Mona Kuhn: The Schindler House, A Love Affair

Mona Kuhn: The Schindler House, A Love Affair by Aline SmithsonSeptember 7, 2024

©MonaKuhn_EMBLEM_KingsRoad, Courtesy Galerie XII

The fall line-up of exciting photography exhibitions has officially kicked off and in Los Angeles it starts with Mona Kuhn’s offering, The Schindler House, A Love Affair, opening at Galerie XII Los Angeles, running from Saturday, September 7, 2024 to Saturday, October 12, 2024. The exhibition will include photography, multimedia and sound installation. The exhibition opening will coincide with the 30th anniversary of Bergamot Station Arts Center and PST Art: Art & Science Collide, a J. Paul Getty Museum event. In addition, it is also part of the Digital New Art Festival DNA Santa Monica.

Her recent monograph, King’s Road, published by STEIDL will be available at the exhibition.

In Kings Road Mona Kuhn lyrically 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 1920s and ’30s.

For this project Kuhn collaborated with the Department of History of Art and Architecture at UC Santa Barbara, and gained access to Schindler’s private archives including blueprints, letters and notes. Alongside reproducing some of these for the first time in this book, Kuhn reinterprets the dichotomy between memory and record in a series of color photos, and solarized gelatin silver prints, a technique favored by the Surrealists. The enigmatic subject of her solarized pictures is a fictional, ethereal figure inspired by a letter from Schindler to a mysterious woman. Kuhn’s impressionistic photos render this female presence physical, even as it seems to be dematerializing: fleeting images that question the very nature of photography as record.

©Mona Kuhn, KingsR oad Book published by STEIDL

Mona Kuhn was born in São Paulo, Brazil, of German descent in 1969. 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 an independent scholar at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles-based works have been shown steadily, revealing an astonishing consistency in technique, subject, and purpose. In 2001, Kuhn’s photographs were first seen by an influential audience during the exhibition at Charles Cowles Gallery in Chelsea, New York. Kuhn’s distinct aesthetic propelled her as one of the most collectible contemporary art photographers. Her work is in private and public collections worldwide and is represented by galleries in the United States, Europe, and Asia. In 2021, Kuhn received The Stieglitz Award for her contributions to fine art photography. Occasionally, Mona has taught at UCLA and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Kuhn’s first monograph, Photographs, was debuted by Steidl in 2004; is followed by Evidence (2007), Native (2010), Bordeaux Series (2011), Private< (2014), and She Disappeared into Complete Silence (2018/19). In addition, Stanley/Barker Editions published Kuhn’s Bushes & Succulents in 2018. In 2021, Thames & Hudson published a career retrospective titled Works. Kuhn’s most recent publication Kings Road with Steidl accompanies a multi-dimensional museum exhibition in Germany and the US.

Mona Kuhn’s work is in private and public collections worldwide, including The J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Hammer Museum, the Perez Art Museum in Miami, the 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. Mona Kuhn lives and works in Los Angeles.

Instagram: @monakuhnstudio
Instagram: @borissalchow
Instagram: @galerie_xii
Instagram: @steidl

©MonaKuhn_ArtistPortrait_At Studio in LA

Mona Kuhn at her studio in Los Angeles

Kuhn has a long legacy of using light and color to shape and amplify her exquisite figurations and nudes. Southern California is a beacon for light filled architecture, designed with clean lines and vistas that invite the outside, inside. Kuhn has masterfully connected the worlds of walls and windows with those who bring a beautiful heartbeat to the structures, allowing the architecture a new sense of life and energy.

Galerie Xll shares: The enigmatic subject of Kuhn’s series is an imagined, ethereal figure inspired by a letter from the famed architect R.M. Schindler to a mysterious lover. Shot in the 1920s modernist house designed and built by Schindler on Kings Road in West Hollywood, each portrait is solarized, a technique favored by master surrealists in the 1920s, including Lee Miller and Man Ray. The resulting impressionistic images question the very nature of lyrical fiction and photography as a record, capturing the physical presence of this mysterious woman even as it appears to dematerialize,