Current

18.7 – 13.9 2025

Pathfinders: Ilse Bing, Kati Horna, Dora Maar

45 Maddox Street

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

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
2

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
1

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.

2

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.

Kati Horna, Untitled, Leonora Carrington from the series 'Ode to Necrophilia', 1962, Pathfinders, Huxley-Parlour, 18.07–13.09.25
Dora Maar Pathfinders At Huxley-Parlour 45 Maddox Street London
3

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

1

Ilse Bing

Façade with French Flag, Paris

1934

Silver gelatin print

2

Ilse Bing

Avenue du Maine, Paris

1932

Silver gelatin print

3

Ilse Bing

Cancan Dancers, Moulin Rouge, Paris

1931

Silver gelatin print

4

Ilse Bing

New York

1951

Silver gelatin print

5

Ilse Bing

Reflection, Rue de Valois, Paris

1932

Silver gelatin print, printed 1941

6

Ilse Bing

View from the Algonquin Hotel at Night, New York

1936

Silver gelatin print

7

Ilse Bing

Eiffel Tower

1931

Ferrotyped silver gelatin print, printed 1950s

8

Ilse Bing

All Paris in a Box

1931

Silver gelatin print

9

Ilse Bing

Cancan Dancers, Moulin Rouge, Paris

1931

Silver gelatin print

10

Ilse Bing

Boxing, Moulin Rouge, Paris

1931

Silver gelatin print

11

Ilse Bing

Trapeze Artists, Ringling Brothers’ Circus, New York

1936

Silver gelatin print

12

Ilse Bing

Self-Portrait with Leica Camera, Paris

Signed and dated. 1931

Silver gelatin print, printed 1994

13

Kati Horna

Stairway to the Cathedral

1938

Unique silver gelatin contact print

14

Kati Horna

Untitled, from the series ‘Paris Flea Markets’

1933

Unique silver gelatin contact print

15

Kati Horna

Untitled

1949

Unique silver gelatin contact print

16

Kati Horna

The Water Bottle

1962

Unique silver gelatin contact print

17

Kati Horna

Leonora Carrington, from the series ‘Ode to Necrophilia’

1962

Unique silver gelatin contact print

18

Kati Horna

Leonora Carrington, from the series ‘Ode to Necrophilia’

1962

Unique silver gelatin contact print

19

Kati Horna

Leonora Carrington, from the series ‘Ode to Necrophilia’

1962

Unique silver gelatin contact print

20

Kati Horna

Leonora Carrington, from the series ‘Ode to Necrophilia’

1962

Unique silver gelatin contact print

21

Kati Horna

Eyedrops

c. 1962

Unique silver gelatin contact print

22

Kati Horna

Leonora Carrington in her Home

1960s

Unique silver gelatin contact print

23

Kati Horna

Untitled

1960s

Unique silver gelatin contact print

24

Kati Horna

Portrait of a Doll Made by Kati Horna

1950s

Unique silver gelatin contact print

25

Kati Horna

Frida Kahlo’s Bedroom

1950s

Unique silver gelatin contact print

26

Kati Horna

Remedios Varo Wearing a Mask by Leonora Carrington

1957

Unique silver gelatin contact print

27

Kati Horna

Leonora Carrington in her Studio

1960s

Unique silver gelatin contact print

28

Kati Horna

Leonora Carrington in Mexico City

1950s

Unique silver gelatin contact print

29

Kati Horna

Untitled, from the series ‘Fear Dolls’

c. 1939

Unique silver gelatin contact print

30

Dora Maar

Window Display (Hairdresser’s)

c. 1935

Unique silver gelatin contact print

31

Dora Maar

Battersea Power Station, The Cathedral of Electrons, London

1934

Unique silver gelatin contact print, printed c. 1934

32

Dora Maar

Hotel Façade From Above, Paris, (Façade de l’Hôtel en Plongée, Paris) I

1935

Unique silver gelatin contact print

33

Dora Maar

Woman in the Streets of Paris (Back View July 14?)

c. 1935

Unique silver gelatin contact print

34

Dora Maar

Singers on Crutches, London [Chanteurs Unijambistes, Londres]

1934

Unique silver gelatin contact print, printed c. 1934

35

Dora Maar

Blind Musician, London

1934

Unique silver gelatin contact print

36

Dora Maar

Pearly Kid, London, (Pearly Kid, Londres)

1934

Unique silver gelatin contact print

37

Dora Maar

Woman with a Fur Collar in Front of a Peugeot Sign, Paris

c. 1935

Unique silver gelatin contact print

38

Dora Maar

Rooves [The Pantheon in the Distance], Paris, (Toits [Le Panthéon au Loin], Paris)

c. 1935

Unique silver gelatin contact print

39

Dora Maar

Booksellers (Couple)

1934

Unique silver gelatin contact print

40

Dora Maar

Londoners Sitting (Park), London

1934

Unique silver gelatin contact print

41

Dora Maar

Lifeboat, Calais

c. 1935

Unique silver gelatin contact print

42

Dora Maar

Sea [Foam], (Marines [Écume]) II

c. 1930

Unique silver gelatin contact print

43

Dora Maar

Study of Light on Water, (Études de Lumière sur l’Eau) II

c. 1935

Unique silver gelatin contact print

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