Mona Kuhn "New Works"
November 3, 2016 - December 17, 2017

In conjunction with Photo Saint Germain, Catherine and André Hug Gallery present "Mona Kuhn: New Works" a selection of photographs from Kuhn’s two most recent bodies of work, Private and Acido Dorado.

Kuhn begins each series with a specific color palette and emotion in mind; consequently each body of work is like a lyrical ballad, opening up a dialogue about the human body’s interaction with its physical environment. Her primary focus is the body, and though her early work leans more towards traditional figuration, these pieces see her actively broaden her scope, turning her attention to landscape, abstraction, and the body’s relationship to architecture.

Acido Dorado is set inside architect Robert Stone’s secluded modernist structure in Joshua Tree National Park, California. In this series, Kuhn and her subject, close friend and long- time collaborator Jacintha, explore pools, mirrored ceilings and glass walls to produce sandy- colored hallucinations filled with dreamy light leaks and seductive reflections. Landscapes, architectural details, reflections and a single figure repeatedly obscured and dislocated create photographs that verge on abstraction. Kuhn playfully combines a number of visual strategies; patterning, translucency, and reflectivity and conflates them with the casual closeness of a photographer and her subject.

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. Shot over two years in the Mojave desert Kuhn created a sequence of pictures that is seductive, enigmatic and a little unsettling.

Mona Kuhn is 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 UCLA, School of Arts and Architecture.

This year she is continuing to curate with The Billboard Creative, a Los Angeles based non profit organization that takes over unused billboards and transforms billboards into public art. Kuhn will curate two exhibitions this year, Cuba: Uncensored, on ten billboards throughout Cuba featuring artists currently living and working there, and a yet untitled exhibition converting thirty billboards at prominent intersections throughout Los Angeles. She was recently acquired by the Hammer Museum and LACMA and her work 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), Private (2014) . Her newest monograph, Acido Dorado , also published by Steidl, will be released in the Fall 2016