Pathfinders: Ilse Bing, Kati Horna, Dora Maar
18.07 – 13.09.2025
Includes:BingHornaMaar–
Current
Hours
Monday to Friday, 11:00am – 5:30pm
Saturday, 10:00am – 1:00pm
Gallery
45 Maddox Street
London
W1S 2PE
Dora Maar, Rooves (The Pantheon in the Distance), c. 1935
Ilse Bing, Self Portrait with Leica Camera, Paris, 1931
Please note that the gallery is closed on Saturdays during August.
Huxley-Parlour are pleased to announce Pathfinders, an exhibition presenting important photographic works by Ilse Bing, Kati Horna and Dora Maar. Though shaped by different trajectories, these three artists shared an acute sensitivity to modern life: its velocity, its fragmentation, and its dislocations. Working in the shadow of political upheaval, each turned their camera toward the street, the surreal, and the overlooked, forging a new visual language for the Modern age.
Includes: Ilse Bing, Kati Horna, Dora Maar
Ilse Bing, Self Portrait with Leica Camera, Paris, 1931
Though each artist navigated her own distinct practice, seen together, these three singular takes on Modernism chart a path of reinvention. Their work spanned decades and continents, moving from Surrealist inflected street photography to experimentation with photomontage, solarisation and other darkroom techniques. Pathfinders brings three oeuvres into dialogue, illuminating how each shaped photography as a mode of modern seeing. Their artistic trajectories echo those of countless other creatives displaced by war and authoritarianism, figures whose lives were rerouted by history and whose visions bear the imprint of exile. Together, Bing, Horna, and Maar forged new routes shaped by resistance, reinvention, and the imagination.
Highlights
6
Ilse Bing (1899-1998), working with a Leica, brought a radical precision to the observation of daily life. The works on view – depicting dancers at the Moulin Rouge and circus performers – demonstrate her pursuit of clarity in motion. Other works depicting fleeting urban moments shot from innovative, unexpected angles are characteristic of the emerging language of the ‘New Photography’, and helped define the visual lexicon of European Modernism. A German Jewish émigré, Bing was held for a period in an internment camp in France, before escaping to New York in 1941. Here she experimented with night photography before her work took on a more introspective tone in response to exile and displacement.
Kati Horna (1912-2000) was born Katalin Deutsch, and lived in Budapest, Berlin and Paris before relocating to Barcelona to collaborate with antifascist networks during the Spanish Civil War. Her images of wartime Spain offer a distinct gendered perspective of the bitter conflict. Fleeing Nazi persecution, she emigrated to Mexico in 1939. In Mexico City, she was a central figure in a community of exiled Surrealist artists that included Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Works on view in the exhibition, featuring bodies distorted by glass and obscured by masks, demonstrate a personal photographic language rooted in the theatrical and the uncanny.
A group of vintage contact prints from the 1930s reveals Dora Maar’s (1907-1997) sensitivity to juxtapositions of form, surface, and the surreal. Her images – of mannequins, deserted streets, and fractured reflections – offer quiet dislocations of the real. Working with a handheld Rolleiflex, Maar embraced urban life while hinting at its strangeness. Maar’s photographic career was disrupted by the Nazi occupation of Paris, leading to a period of withdrawal and introspection that profoundly shaped the tone of her later work.
The Exhibition
4
The Works
43
Ilse Bing
Façade with French Flag, Paris
1934
Silver gelatin print
Ilse Bing
Avenue du Maine, Paris
1932
Silver gelatin print
Ilse Bing
Cancan Dancers, Moulin Rouge, Paris
1931
Silver gelatin print
Ilse Bing
New York
1951
Silver gelatin print
Ilse Bing
Reflection, Rue de Valois, Paris
1932
Silver gelatin print, printed 1941
Ilse Bing
View from the Algonquin Hotel at Night, New York
1936
Silver gelatin print
Ilse Bing
Eiffel Tower
1931
Ferrotyped silver gelatin print, printed 1950s
Ilse Bing
All Paris in a Box
1931
Silver gelatin print
Ilse Bing
Cancan Dancers, Moulin Rouge, Paris
1931
Silver gelatin print
Ilse Bing
Boxing, Moulin Rouge, Paris
1931
Silver gelatin print
Ilse Bing
Trapeze Artists, Ringling Brothers’ Circus, New York
1936
Silver gelatin print
Ilse Bing
Self-Portrait with Leica Camera, Paris
Signed and dated. 1931
Silver gelatin print, printed 1994
Kati Horna
Stairway to the Cathedral
1938
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
Untitled, from the series ‘Paris Flea Markets’
1933
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
Untitled
1949
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
The Water Bottle
1962
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
Leonora Carrington, from the series ‘Ode to Necrophilia’
1962
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
Leonora Carrington, from the series ‘Ode to Necrophilia’
1962
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
Leonora Carrington, from the series ‘Ode to Necrophilia’
1962
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
Leonora Carrington, from the series ‘Ode to Necrophilia’
1962
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
Eyedrops
c. 1962
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
Leonora Carrington in her Home
1960s
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
Untitled
1960s
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
Portrait of a Doll Made by Kati Horna
1950s
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
Frida Kahlo’s Bedroom
1950s
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
Remedios Varo Wearing a Mask by Leonora Carrington
1957
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
Leonora Carrington in her Studio
1960s
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
Leonora Carrington in Mexico City
1950s
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Kati Horna
Untitled, from the series ‘Fear Dolls’
c. 1939
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Dora Maar
Window Display (Hairdresser’s)
c. 1935
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Dora Maar
Battersea Power Station, The Cathedral of Electrons, London
1934
Unique silver gelatin contact print, printed c. 1934
Dora Maar
Hotel Façade From Above, Paris, (Façade de l’Hôtel en Plongée, Paris) I
1935
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Dora Maar
Woman in the Streets of Paris (Back View July 14?)
c. 1935
Unique silver gelatin contact print
![Dora Maar, Singers on Crutches, London [Chanteurs Unijambistes, Londres], 1934](https://huxleyparlour.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Screenshot-2023-03-27-at-11.17.12.png)
Dora Maar
Singers on Crutches, London [Chanteurs Unijambistes, Londres]
1934
Unique silver gelatin contact print, printed c. 1934
Dora Maar
Blind Musician, London
1934
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Dora Maar
Pearly Kid, London, (Pearly Kid, Londres)
1934
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Dora Maar
Woman with a Fur Collar in Front of a Peugeot Sign, Paris
c. 1935
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Dora Maar
Rooves [The Pantheon in the Distance], Paris, (Toits [Le Panthéon au Loin], Paris)
c. 1935
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Dora Maar
Booksellers (Couple)
1934
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Dora Maar
Londoners Sitting (Park), London
1934
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Dora Maar
Lifeboat, Calais
c. 1935
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Dora Maar
Sea [Foam], (Marines [Écume]) II
c. 1930
Unique silver gelatin contact print
Dora Maar
Study of Light on Water, (Études de Lumière sur l’Eau) II
c. 1935
Unique silver gelatin contact print