El Botellón (The Water Bottle)

1962

Not on view

Born in Budapest, Horna was a deeply cosmopolitan photographer whose work straddles politically engaged photojournalism and Surrealist poetics. In the early 1930s, she left Budapest for Berlin and Paris, honing her skills alongside other avant-garde artists of her generation. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she relocated to Spain, where she documented the war's effect on the lives of ordinary citizens, publishing her photographs in anarchist magazines. In 1938 she fled Spain for Mexico, joining a circle of left-wing artists and intellectuals who cultivated their own idiosyncratic versions of European Surrealism. This phantasmagorical photograph of a woman's face obscured by a large glass water bottle belongs to a series of images titled "Artificial Paradises" that Horna produced for the short-lived avant-garde magazine, S.nob, published in Mexico City from June to October 1962.

Artwork Details

Title: El Botellón (The Water Bottle)
Artist: Kati Horna (Mexican (born Hungary), Szilasbalhás 1912–2000 Mexico City)
Date: 1962
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: 10 1/16 × 8 1/8 in. (25.5 × 20.7 cm)
Classification: Photographs
Credit Line: Funds from various donors, in memory of Randie Malinsky, 2019
Object Number: 2019.68
Curatorial Department: Photographs

More Artwork

By Kati Horna

In the same medium

From the same time and place

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Untitled

Kati Horna

1950, printed ca. 1960

Militiamen in a Trench, Kati Horna Hungarian, gelatin silver print — Militiamen in a Trench
Kati Horna
1937–38

Haile Salassie, Former Emperor of Ethiopia, Photographed at the Railway Station of Geneva on His Arrival to the League of Nation's Historic Session, Lucien Aigner Hungarian, Gelatin silver print — Haile Salassie, Former Emperor of Ethiopia, Photographed at the Railway Station of Geneva on His Arrival to the League of Nation's Historic Session
Lucien Aigner
1935

Ballet Practice at the Grand Opera, Paris, Lucien Aigner Hungarian, Gelatin silver print — Ballet Practice at the Grand Opera, Paris
Lucien Aigner
1934

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