Mona Kuhn

Esperancca, 2009From the series ‘Native ’

Mona Kuhn Biography Mona Kuhn is a renowned photographer who was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1969. Acclaimed for her contemporary depictions of the human form, Kuhn is considered a leading photographer in the world of figurative discourse. Throughout a career spanning more than twenty years, Kuhn’s practice has focused on the mysteries of the physical and metaphysical presence of the figure. Her photographs often feature human subjects in natural environments, with a focus on the nude and its relationship to the natural world. Her photographs display a strong sense of intimacy, simplicity, and sensuality. As Kuhn solidified her photographic style, she has created a notable approach to the nude by developing friendships with her subjects, creating a range of playful visual strategies that use natural light and alluring settings to evoke a symbiotic relationship between the human figure and the settings in which they are photographed. In 1989, Kuhn moved to the US and earned her BA from The Ohio State University, before furthering her studies at the San Francisco Art institute. She is currently an independent scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Kuhn occasionally teaches photography at UCLA at the Center College of Design in Pasadena. For the past two decades, Kuhn’s photographs have been exhibited steadily. In 2001, her work was first seen by an influential audience during the exhibition at Charles Cowles Gallery in New York. Since then, her photographs have been exhibited internationally, including in major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, London, and other major capitals across Europe, the US, and Asia. In 2021, Kuhn received the Stieglitz Award in recognition of her contributions to the field of fine art photography. One of Kuhn’s most significant projects is her ongoing series, She Disappeared Into Complete Silence, which began in 2013. In this series, she takes a new direction into abstraction, connecting the interior to the exterior, the visible to the hidden. Kuhn’s most recent series, Kings Road, reconsiders the realms of time and space within the architectural elements of the Schindler House in Los Angeles. Built by Austrian architect Rudolph M. Schindler in 1922, the house was both a social and design experiment and an avant-garde hub for intellectuals and artists in the 1920’s and ‘30s. For this series, Kuhn worked with the Department of History of Art and Architecture at UC Santa Barbara to gain access to private archives including blueprints, letters, and notes. In her photographs, Kuhn reconceptualizes the separation between memory and record in a series of color photos and solarized silver gelatin prints, a technique favored by the Surrealists. Opening in April of 2023, Kuhn will exhibit this series at the Kunsthaus Göttingen in Germany, an exhibition space founded by Gerhard Steidl. Mona Kuhn’s monographs include Photographs, debuted by Steidl in 2004; followed by Evidence (2007), Native (2010), Bordeaux Series (2011), Private (2014), and She Disappeared into Complete Silence (2018/19); Bushes and Succulents was published by Stanley/Barker Editions in 2018. In 2021, Thames & Hudson published a stunning career retrospective titled Works. Kuhn's most recent publication Kings Road is published by Steidl. Kuhn’s work is in private and public collections worldwide, including The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Hammer Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Kiyosato Museum in Japan. Kuhn's work has been exhibited at The Louvre Museum and Le Bal in Paris, The Whitechapel Gallery and Royal Academy of Arts in London, Musée de l’Elysée in Switzerland, Leopold Museum in Vienna Austria, The Polygon Gallery in Vancouver Canada, Australian Centre for Photography and Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan.