Having resided in the same private collection for over fifty years, Isamu Noguchi’s The Comb displays the essence of the artist’s poetic and deeply spiritual sculptural practice. Carved from a single piece of solid black granite, Noguchi’s form creates a dynamic and dramatic silhouette against whichever backdrop it is placed. Executed in 1962, The Comb also contains elements of Noguchi’s preferred circular forms. “I love stone because it is the most flexible and meaning-impregnated material,” he once said. “The whole world is made of stone. It’s nothing new. It’s as old as the hills. It is our fundament… Stone has a quality of durability. It does not pollute. It merely goes back to earth naturally” (I. Noguchi, quoted by S. Hunter, Isamu Noguchi, New York, 1978, p. 121). Throughout his career Noguchi worked in a number of different materials including wood, slate and marble, and during the late 1960s granite became one of his favorite mediums. After spending time working with Constantin Brâncuşi in Paris in the 1920s, he turned to modernism and abstraction, infusing his highly finished forms with a palpable sense of mystery. As an artist he sought out materials that he felt matched the character of the places with which he felt an affinity. He felt granite evoked nature, the earth, and a sense of longevity. “I have since thought of,” he once said, “…my close embrace of the earth as a seeking after identity with some primal matter beyond personalities and possessions….I wanted something irreducible, an absence of the gimmicky and clever” (I. Noguchi, op. cit., p.257).

The Comb
granite, wood, metal base
1962
Isamu Noguchi
(1904-1988)

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Even when covering the Spanish Civil War, Kati Horna’s black-and-white photographs utilized Surrealist tropes; she often used experimental techniques, creating unsettling photomontages and superimposed images that dramatized the conflict’s impact on the civilian population. Born in Budapest, where photographer Robert Capa became a close childhood friend, Horna took up photography and later moved to Berlin, where she met and was inspired by the experimental work of László Moholy-Nagy. Horna then lived in Paris for several years, where she and Capa reunited; they left Paris together to photograph the Spanish Civil War. During this time, Horna produced some of the images for which she is best known, including Breastfeeding Woman (1937), a portrait of a mother in a Madrid refugee camp. During the onset of World War II, Horna fled Europe for Mexico, where she remained for the rest of her life. She became part of an artistic circle of émigrés that included Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo—often photographing them and other Mexican cultural figures. Horna had a major 2014 retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

Sin Titulo (Untitled)
silver gelatin print
1962
Ciudad de México
en colaboración con José Horna
Kati Horna
(1912-2000, born Hungary)

#surrealism #mexicansurrealism #katihorna #josehorna #photograph #untitled #dated1962 #mexicocity #cdmx #surrealistphotography #photography #silvergelatinprint