MONA KUHN

Mona Kuhn was born in 1969 in São Paulo, Brazil and is of German descent. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BA from The Ohio State University and went on to study fine art at the San Francisco Art Institute. In addition to her photographic work, Kuhn is an independent scholar at The Getty Research Institute and was just appointed Lecturer at the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture. Her work was acquired by the Hammer Museum and LACMA and is in private and public collections worldwide, including: The J. Paul Getty Museum, California; George Eastman House Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Musée de l’Elysée, Switzerland; Musée de la Photographie de Charleroi, Belgium; Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Japan; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; The Louvre Museum, Paris, France; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; and the Buhl Foundation, New York. Steidl has published five monographs of Kuhn’s work to date, Photographs (2004), Evidence (2007), Native (2009), Bordeaux (2011), and Private (2014). Her newest monograph, “She disappeared into complete silence” (2019).
Mona Kuhn is acclaimed for her intimate, contemporary depictions of the nude. Through intimacy with her subjects, knowledge of traditional iconography, and technical mastery, Kuhn portrays the complexities of human nature, both tempting and provoking the viewer’s imagination. Kuhn’s playful combination of a number of visual strategies, such as patterning, translucency, and reflectivity, explores our connectedness with the environment. Her body of work includes images from the American desert, a French naturist colony, and her birthplace of Brazil .