Mona Kuhn

LA-based artist 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 where she returned after a 20 year absence. 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 workKuhn 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