Mona Kuhn (born 1969 in São Paulo, Brazil) is a German-Brazilian contemporary photographer best known for her large-scale photographs of the human form and essence. An underlying current in Kuhn’s work is her reflection on our longing for spiritual connection and solidarity. As a result, her approach is unusual in that she develops close relationships with her subjects, resulting in images of remarkable intimacy. Kuhn’s work shows the human body in its natural state while simultaneously re-interpreting the nude as a contemporary canon of art. Her work often references classical themes, has been exhibited internationally, and is held in several collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum and the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Born in São Paulo, Brazil to parents of German ancestry, Mona Kuhn lives and works in Los Angeles, United States.
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Early life
Mona Kuhn began taking photographs at age 12, when her parents gave her a Kodak camera for her birthday. Kuhn has endorsed her incorporation to her further on formative years:
“I didn’t mount up up bearing in mind cousins and I didn’t accumulate up later than grandparents … so I think I always had, since I was a child, a offend inner compulsion to sticking together or to create a little family. I think that the people that I photograph, if I see at anything my series, were everything people that could have been my lengthy family. That’s how I treat them. And that’s the real little seed that maybe comes from infancy.”
She moved to the United States in 1992 to attend Ohio State University and subsequently furthered her studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, moving to San Francisco at the pinnacle of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Kuhn has noted that her artistic influences shift as she is always looking to what is adjacent and enthusiastic to learn something new, but has said: “I scholastic the most by looking at Richard Diebenkorn’s composition, Lucian Freud’s connection with models, Georgia O’Keeffe’s subtleties and Lee Miller’s courage.”
Last update 2021-08-06