For Paris Photo 2018, Atlas Gallery will exhibit photographs by Bauhaus artist-photographer Florence Henri (1893-1982). Having featured in major exhibitions worldwide, this will be the first time in many years that such a large body of her work is available for sale.

Although originally trained as a painter under Fernand Léger, Henri turned to photography after enrolling at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Dessau in 1927 where she encountered the latest art movements - Constructivism, Surrealism, Dadaism and De Stjil. Encouraged by Hungarian constructivist and New Vision photographer László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), and his wife, Lucia Moholy (1894-1989), Henri quickly became one of the most celebrated photographers associated with the Bauhaus.

Between 1928 and the late 1930s, Henri produced her most celebrated works, often using mirrors to manipulate reality to create multifaceted works that expanded the conventional spatial planes and, in doing so, the identity of her subjects. Henri used mirrors for portraits of friends – including Jean Arp, Nelly Van Doesburg, Sonia Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, and Margarete Schall - as well as self-portraits. Henri left the Bauhaus in 1929 and returned to Paris to open a studio and school of photography where she taught renowned photographers Gisèle Freund, Ilse Bing and Lisette Model. During this time Henri produced many still life collages, sensual female nudes and a major series of photomontages based on prints she obtained on a trip to Rome. Henri gave up photography and returned to abstract painting in the 1960s.

Henri’s photographs were included in seminal international exhibitions, such as Fotografie der Gegenwart (1929), and Das Lichtbild (1931), as well as Film Und Foto (1929) that positioned her at the heart of the development of avant-garde photography of the era. Recently she has featured in museum exhibitions including MoMA (the first in 2007, the most recent in 2015), at the Centre Pompidou (2010) and in a major retrospective, Mirror of the Avant Gardes, at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in 2012 that included 130 images from her archive. Henri is also included in the current Tate exhibition, Shape of Light (2018).

The spatial and psychological ambiguity evoked by Henri’s complex compositions will be reflected in the selection of other works on show in the Atlas stand, which include contemporary artists Andreas Gefeller, Kacper Kowlaski, Richard Caldicott and John Messinger.