“El Botellón” (The Water Bottle) was first illustrated in S.nob, a short-lived avant-garde magazine published in Mexico City in 1962. Born in Budapest, Horna was a cosmopolitan photographer who lived in Paris, Berlin, and Spain. In 1938, she fled Spain for Mexico, joining a circle of left-wing artists and intellectuals who cultivated idiosyncratic versions of European Surrealism. This phantasmagorical photograph of a woman’s face obscured by a large glass water bottle belongs to a series titled “Artificial Paradises.”
In “El Botellón,” a woman’s face and chest are abstracted through the thick glass of a large water bottle, her features stretched and transformed almost beyond recognition. Despite the face and upper body being trapped within the bottle’s thick glass, the visible forearm outside the bottle asserts the artist’s control over her own image. Here, abstraction is not a consequence but a deliberate mode of self-expression.