Kati Horna: In Motion: New York City

Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present Kati Horna: In Motion, a solo exhibition of works by Hungarian/Mexican photographer Kati Horna at our New York City gallery. This is Horna’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and her first solo exhibition at a gallery in New York City. Kati Horna: In Motion is on view from March 9, 2023 until May 5, 2023.

"Photography, with its various possibilities, enables one to show, liberate and develop one’s own sensibility which can be expressed in graphic images."

- Kati Horna

Kati Horna (1912-2000) was born to an affluent Jewish family in Budapest, then part of the Austrian Hungarian Empire. Throughout her life Horna would go on to both live and flee Hungary, Germany, France, and Spain. In her later life Horna would go on to state, “I fled Hungary, I fled Berlin, I fled Paris, and I left everything behind in Barcelona... It’s for vagabonds like me. Because my clothes got torn on the route, I selected photography.” The violence, danger, and injustice of the interwar period profoundly influenced Horna’s ideology with photography gifting her with a vehicle for emancipation. 

Horna’s black-and-white photographs utilized Surrealist narratives and featured experimental techniques, unsettling photomontages and superimposition, to further highlight emotion. Art historian Natalia Tiberio states, “In Paris, Kati Horna took inspiration from the French flâneurs and started to capture everyday life in the city – the cafes and their customers, streets, and neighborhoods. There was a particular place that became a great source of interesting photographs: the flea markets. She would drive her lens to objects left behind or that didn’t quite fit displays, creating dreamy, surrealist scenes.” Works from her 1933 series Marchés aux puces are great examples of her unique eye and mischievous spirit. 

Serie Muñecas, reveals surrealist images of broken or discarded dolls and mannequins, a personal memory that Horna took with her from her time photographing the Spanish Civil War. Art historian and curator Michel Otayek shares that “Horna’s experiences of the war in Spain left a deep imprint in her later work. Some of her most personal series explore themes of disillusion, displacement, and loss, oftentimes with a refined sense of irony that can be traced back to the satirical, anti-fascist work of her early years in Europe.”

The outbreak of World War II in 1939 forced Horna to seek refuge in Mexico City. Horna spent the rest of her life in Mexico, her adopted motherland, alongside a close-knit community of exiled European artists, including French Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, English painter Leonora Carrington, and Spanish painter Remedios Varo. Photographs such as Portrait of Leonora Carrington (1960), Remedios Varo (1960), Beatriz Sheridan (1962), and Remedios Varo and Gunther Gerzo at the Wedding of Leonora Carrington and Chiki Weisz (1946) depict Kati’s friends, collaborators, and artists whose careers flourished in Mexico, and shows the sitters in a relaxed pose. Out of their art would come the legacy left by these Surrealist artists that immigrated to Mexico, running from the horrors of World War II.

“It is worth noting that distancing herself from any label that could imprison the deeply personal meaning of her work within the critical parameters of this or that movement—Surrealism, for example—my mother insisted in calling herself an invisibilist. Invisibilism was an attitude towards life that enabled her to survive. By calling herself an invisibilist, she distanced herself from the pretentious or eccentric excesses of the art world, recognizing in her survivor’s condition the true motivating force of her discreet and tireless creative work.”

-Ana María Horna y Fernández, Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press, Americas Society, Curated by Michel Otayek and Christina L. De León

Kati Horna and José Horna’s Mexico City home at 198 Tabasco Street quickly became an artist’s hub soon after they settled there. Their circle was frequented by extraordinary artistic figures of the day, including Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Benjamin Péret, Edward James, and Mathias Goeritz. Carrington and Chiki Weisz celebrated their wedding at the Hornas’ home in 1946. The photographs that Horna took of the small group of friends give us a glimpse of her inner circle of artistic friends. Although unassuming, these snapshots offer a private view of a world that only they shared. The protagonists present were Carrington and Weisz, Gunther Gerzso; José Horna (Kati appears in only one photograph); Eduardo Lizarraga, Benjamin Perét and Remedios Varo; and Miriam Wolf.

“In 1962, Horna was invited to collaborate with S.nob, a late Surrealist avant-garde magazine directed by Salvador Elizondo with Juan García Ponce and Emilio García Riera. Elizondo asked Horna to participate in the magazine’s ‘Fetiche’ [Fetish] section, and the artist’s subsequent contributions ultimately became among the most emblematic images of her career…Horna’s first ‘Fetiche’ piece, Oda a la necrofilia [Ode to Necrophilia], debuted in the June 27, 1962, issue.”

-Christina L. De León, Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press, Americas Society, Curated by Michel Otayek and Christina L. De León

“Horna’s experiences of the war in Spain left a deep imprint in her later work. Some of her most personal series explore themes of disillusion, displacement, and loss, oftentimes with a refined sense of irony that can be traced back to the satirical, anti-fascist work of her early years in Europe.”

-Michael Otayek, Art Historian and Curator

All Images © 2005 Ana Maria Norah Horna y Fernandez