MONA KUHN – SHIMMERING: ZURICH

Shimmering marks Mona Kuhn’s first solo show in Switzerland, bringing together two of her acclaimed series: She Disappeared into Complete Silence and Kings Road. In both bodies of work, Kuhn presents the nude with a humanistic approach by juxtaposing the elusive presence of a solitary figure with the elemental geometry of modernist architecture, thereby shifting figuration into abstraction and raising questions about presence and absence, memory and imagination.  

Mona Kuhn is considered among the most respected and collectable photographers of her generation, with her work held in major institutional and private collections worldwide. Born to German parents in São Paulo, Brazil, the American artist is a citizen of the world. With an open mind and an empathetic gaze, she distills the human figure to its essence through a reductionist yet poetic aesthetic, rendering it both intimate and universal.

She Disappeared into Complete Silence (2014-2019) was photographed at a golden modernist structure in the Californian desert – the desert functioning as a liminal space long associated with wandering and soul-searching, where one always stands naked and exposed. The series revolves around a single female figure, at times placed inside the building, at others outside. The structure’s façade of glass and mirrors dissolves this separation optically, splitting light, mirroring the desert, and obscuring the figure. Often, it is only a reflection or a shadow that the viewer glimpses, or the figure is inversed through the process of solarization and turned into a mere imprint of herself – a memory etched in light. She too becomes a reflective surface, onto which the viewer projects their own self, while she quietly disappears.

In Kings Road (2021/2022), Kuhn seemingly depicts a spectral presence within the modernist architecture of the Schindler House in Los Angeles. Built by Austrian architect Rudolph M. Schindler in 1922, the house incorporates both avant-garde architectural and social theory. It was designed as an experiment in communal living and formally inspired by the simplicity of the Japanese house, which deliberately incorporates emptiness and the play of shadows into the design of a space. Kuhn’s starting point was Schindler’s private archive. She approaches his personal letters, notes, and sketches almost psychoanalytically and interprets them – like the house itself – not as mere factual evidence, but as manifestations of the architect’s subconscious. In one letter, Schindler rejects an unknown, past lover: “Your dreams will never – like so many – meet reality”. Inspired by this lettre de rupture, Kuhn lets a mysterious fictional character roam the empty rooms like the rejected lover’s ghost, between shimmering light and quiet shadows. Through her presence, Kuhn implies that these bare spaces are indeed full of memories and specters of the past. Her dreamlike photographs emphasize the transience of the moment, of memory, and of our own presence.