(1969)
Mona Kuhn was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1969, of German descent. She received her BA from The Ohio State University, before furthering her studies at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996 and then at The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles in 1999. Mona Kuhn's work is figurative. She is interested in redefining ways of looking at the body, as a residence to ourselves. Kuhn’s first monograph, Photographs, was debut by Steidl in 2004; immediately followed by, Evidence, in Spring 2007. The images appearing in Evidence were photographed entirely in a naturist community in France, where she resides each summer.
Mona Kuhn's third monograph titled Native (Steidl, 2009) is an unfolding visual story with images taken in her native country Brazil. Her latest monograph, titled Bordeaux Series (Steidl, 2011), focuses on a series of portraits, nudes and landscapes taken outside of Bordeaux, with a simplistic yet elegant approach.
She is currently working on her upcoming series in the desert regions of California and Arizona, to be released by Fall 2013.
Her work has been exhibited, and is included in public and private collections, internationally and in the United States, among them The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Photographic Art in San Diego, the Cincinnati Art Museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, Georgia Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography in NYC, the George Eastman House International Museum of Art in Rochester, the Griffin Museum in Boston, Miami Museum of Art. In 2011, her work has been exhibited at the Leopold Museum in Vienna Austria, the Royal Academy of Art in London England, Deichtorhallen in Hamburg Germany, and the Australian Center for Photography in Sydney. Currently, Mona lives and works in Los Angeles.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2014 Acido Dorado, Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York
2014 Acido Dorado, Flowers Gallery, London
2012 Bordeaux Series, Galerie Particuliere, Paris, France
2012 Native, Galeria Pilar Serra, Madrid, Spain
2012 Bordeaux Series, Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta
2012 Bordeaux, Flowers Gallery, New York, New York
2012 Native, Brancolini Grimaldi, Florence, Italy
2011 Bordeaux, Flowers Gallery, London, England
2010 Native, Flowers Gallery, London, England
2010 Native, Flowers Gallery, New York, New York
2009 Native, M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, California
2009 Native, Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia
2008 Evidence, Jarach Gallery, Venice, Italy
2007 Evidence, Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco, California
2007 Evidence, Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, New York
2007 Mona Kuhn, Estiarte Gallery, Madrid, Spain
2007 Evidence, Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia
2007 Less Than Innocent, M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, California
2005 Mona Kuhn – Recent Color Work, Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, New York
2005 Mona Kuhn-Close, Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia
2005 Unbounded Youth, Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, California
2004 Mona Kuhn-Color, Camerawork, Berlin, Germany
2004 New Work, G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle, Washington
2004 Corporeal Space, Galerie F5.6, Munique, Germany
2004 Mona Kuhn - Color Photographs, Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco, California
2004 Still Memory, PhotoEye Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
2004 Body Language, Camerawork AG, Hamburg, Germany
2003 Somata, Schumann Galerie, Munique, Germany
2002 Mona Kuhn-recent work, Momus Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia
2001 Mona Kuhn-recent work, Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco, California
2001 Bare, Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, New York
2001 Mona Kuhn, Bassetti Fine Art Photo Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana
2000 Bei Nahe, Bodo Niemann Galerie, Berlin, Germany
2000 Mona Kuhn, G.Gibson Gallery, Seattle, Washington
1999 Mona Kuhn-recent work, Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco, California
1998 Mona Kuhn Nus, Elkis Gallery, São Paulo, Brazil
1997 Mona Kuhn, Tappert Galerie, Berlin, Germany
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| All about Eve, 2006 Photo by Mona Kuhn |
2013 Living Rooms: Robert Wilson Collection, Le Louvre, Paris, France
2013 Image Search, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida
2013 Staking Claim, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego
2013 Under My Skin: Contemporary Nudes, Flowers Gallery, New York
2013 The Salt in My Skin: Mona Kuhn and Esther Teichmann, Flowers Gallery, London
2013 Mona Kuhn and Carla van de Puttelaar, Kahmann Gallery, Amsterdam
2013 Spring Photography Selection, Flowers Gallery, London
2012 Nudes, Flowers Gallery, New York
2011 Magie des Objekts, Leopold Museum, Vienna, Austria
2011 Royal Academy of Arts, Summer Exhibition, London, England
2011 Traummänner, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany
2011 100 Portraits, Australian Center for Photography, Sydney
2010 State of Mind, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, California
2009 On the way to Robert Frank, Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland
2009 Au Feminin, Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris, France
2009 Anonymity, Sol Mednick Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2008 Modern Photographs, The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York
2008 People and Places, Southwest Center for Contemporary Art, North Carolina
2007 Featured Works of Contemporary Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, North Carolina
2007 The Machine, the Body and the City, Miami Museum of Art, Florida
2006 The Body Familiar, Current Perspectives of the Nude, Griffin Museum, Boston, Massachusetts
2005 Portrait & Figure Study in Contemporary Photography, Westport Arts Center, Connecticut
2005 Face Cachée, Galerie Esther Woerdehoff, Paris, France
2005 The Children’s Hour, Museum of New Art, Michigan
2004 Il nudo nell’arte, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy
2003 Traditions on Figure, G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle, Washington
2002 March Group Exhibition, G.Gibson Gallery, Seattle, Washington
2002 Collective, Vickie Bassetti Fine Art, New Orleans, Louisiana
2001 Love and Trust, Momus Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia
2001 Best of 2001 curated by Jack Spencer, Cumberland Gallery, Tennessee
2001 PhotoMetro, SFAC Gallery, San Francisco, California
2000 German Artists, Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco, California
2000 Among Us, Paba Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
2000 Collective, G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle, Washington
2000 The Body in Art, Francoise Gallery, Maryland, Virginia
2000 Nudes from Past to Present, Etherton Gallery, Tucson, Arizona
2000 Love, Vorpal Gallery, San Francisco, California
1999 Collective Figurative Artists, Mauritz Gallery, Columbus, Ohio
1999 Female Figures, WomanMade Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
1998 Bare Skin, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio
1998 Minimal Skin, Museum of Arts Downtown, Los Angeles, California
1998 Collective Figurative, Museum Of Arts Downtown Los Angeles, California
1997 Contemporary Women Photographers, Scott Nichols Gallery, SF, California
1997 Brazilian Contemporary Art, Mission Cultural Center, San Francisco, California
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| Three Figures, 2006 Photo by Mona Kuhn |
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Griffin Museum, Winchester, Massachusetts
George Eastman House Museum, Rochester
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland
Musée de la Photographie de Charleroi, Belgium
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Japan
Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California
Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California
Miami Art Museum, Miami, Florida
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
The Byrd Hoffman Watermill Foundation, New York
di Rosa Foundation, San Francisco, California
Buhl Foundation, New York, New York
Sir Elton John Collection, United Kingdom
Paul Allen Collection, Seattle, Washington
Allen Thomas Jr. Collection, North Carolina
Schwarz Contemporary Art Collection, Berlin, Germany
Nicolaus von Oesterreich Collection, Frankfurt, Germany
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| Mona Kuhn |
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| Portrait 5, Borodeaux Series Photo by Mona Kuhn |
Andersen, W. V. (2014) "Picasso and the Alien Oil Cloth". MIT Press, USA.
Barth, N. (2011) "Träummanner, Exhibition Catalog. Dumont Press, Germany.
Xavier, C. (2011) "Images d'une Collection, Musee de la Photographie a Chaleroi." Die Keure, Belgium.
Anderson, W. V. and Rice, S. (2009) Mona Kuhn: Native. Steidl, Germany.
Baldwin, G. (2007) Mona Kuhn: Evidence. Steidl, Germany.
Kuhn, M. (2011) Mona Kuhn: Bordeaux Series. Steidl, Germany.
For her fifth book with Steidl, Mona Kuhn has entered the heart of the American desert and returned with a sequence of pictures that is seductive, enigmatic and a little unsettling. "Private" proposes a world in which concrete reality and the imaginary are one. Plants and animals on the edge of survival, sun-drenched landscapes and wind-sculpted earth are intercut with a series of nudes that push Kuhn’s renowned sensitivity to human form into unexpected directions. The result is a book somewhere between the poetry of TS Eliot, the cinema of Robert Altman, and a lucid dream. (Steidl)
I spoke with Mona last spring for L'Oeil de la Photographie about her work in "PRIVATE." Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
“Private” is a personal journey, weaving together the desert beauty with its brutal sense of mortality, understanding mysticism and our place in it; a calm introspective series of images I took over a period of two years. I entered the heart of the American desert, traveling through the Mojave and Arizona regions, entering for the first time the remote parts of a Navajo reservation, areas close to James Turrel’s Roden Crater.
I usually start a new series with colors. I knew I wanted a little bit of that golden sand skin tonality. I wanted black as it has a certain sense of mortality. You are constantly testing your endurance in the desert, the limits of how long you can stay out there or how debilitating it is to be at 100 and some degrees. Your system really slows down and you can’t think straight. So the whole series is about our vulnerability in that environment as a metaphor to life.
At the time I was reading T. S. Eliot “The Waste Land.” There are no direct parallels, but I noticed a certain essence of his poem in the work, like a perfume that stays in the air after someone left.
I wanted to approach what is truly strange, beautiful and disorienting about the desert. Aside from vast landscapes and intimate nudes, for the first time I also photographed a few desert animals as metaphors. I was intrigued by their mysticism, like desert shamans, they have an instinct of their own. They know well their place and function in that vast space. Like the California pale moths that fly into the light. Or a black widow tattooed on a woman’s hand. I photographed a majestic black condor, then I photographed a Nephila’s golden spider web. Animals seem to understand nature's balance and survive better than humans in the desert.
I met a lot of people who moved to the desert because they want to escape or get “off the grid”. But the desert is not for the weak of the heart. It offers an alluring American sense of freedom, but its harsh reality does not cease to remind us of our own limitations. It is shocking to face one’s own mortality. Lee Friedlander once said: “The desert is a wonderful, awful, seductive, alluring stage on which to be acting out the photography game.”
One of the homes I stayed in was built on top of this slanted rock formation. Underneath that slanted rock, there was a large shaded open area, like the shape of a mouth half open. A perfect habitat for rattlesnakes. This guy had dozens of stretched rattlesnake skins stapled on plywood board to dry out, all over the place. Hundreds of snakes live right under his rock foundation. I arrived at places and entered homes I could have never imagined before. But at the same time, being who I am, I wasn’t going to photograph the desert like “Breaking Bad.” I wanted to photograph the desert with a certain human element to relate to the beauty and the harshness. So there is a lot more landscape in this series than most.
The light is incredibly sharp; it contracts the pupils into tiny dots, making views of crystal clarity in which light and land are one. At times, I would photograph just the light by itself, its abstractions, bright sunlight and the graphic dark shadows - it had a powerful and minimal feel to it.
I photographed some people along the way, at times in their homes. Most homes I have been inside had their curtains closed. People get tired of the heat, you start feeling the weight of light, it becomes heavy. You go into people’s homes and all shades are down. Some of the desert people I met prefer to live in darkness.
You can easily loose the sense of scale in the desert.
In 1930’s, Georgia O’Keefe would often refer to what she called the “Faraway Nearby”. I photographed what seemed to have a force and scale of its own, that being macro or micro. One of these beautiful places was Grand Falls in a Navajo Reserve in Arizona. It is a larger than life multilayered waterfall system. But the water is not clear; the water carries this monochromatic sand-like tonalities with it. It looks like a waterfall of skin tones. There, water and skin become one. On the opposite scale, I found a little spring flower that was so frail. It’s very delicate image shot from above. T.S. Elliot would say that Spring season lasts only one day in the desert. The Spring flower rises in the morning and dies at night. Along a similar scale curiously I shot from the computer screen an image of California City, a planned but unrealized urban development. The roads marked out in the dust for a civilization that never really came, seen from a camera orbiting miles above the desert. Like ruins in reverse.
Mona Kuhn
Private
Hardback / Clothbound, 112 pages
GALLERY
