The first UK exhibition of Harry Callahan’s work since it was displayed at Tate Modern in 2013 will open at Huxley-Parlour on March 13.

The show will focus on works from the first two decades of Callahan’s career, from the early 1940s until the late 1950s, when he was based in Chicago. Callahan met Hungarian painter and photographer, László Moholy-Nagy in 1946, and went on to join the faculty of the New Bauhaus school that Moholy-Nagy established in the city. Much of Callahan’s work from this period explores both total abstraction and the technicalities of the photographic medium, including use of double and triple exposures, blurs, extreme contrasts and collage.

Incorporating landscape, portraiture and abstraction, the exhibition demonstrates Callahan’s drive for experimentation and his profound visual response to his personal life. Throughout this period in Chicago, Callahan meticulously and repeatedly photographed his wife Eleanor, his daughter Barbara, and the cityscape of Chicago. Eleanor was his most photographed subject and very often his portraits of her comfortably overlapped with his landscapes and abstraction, using her female form as its basis.

Harry Callahan (1912-1999) worked as a clerk for Chrysler before attending a workshop by Ansel Adams in 1941, which led him to pursue photography. Since his first solo exhibition in 1947, Callahan’s work has been the subject of over sixty exhibitions around the world. His work is held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Harry Callahan
Huxley-Parlour
March 13 – April 6, 2019
London

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