C U R R E N T E X H I B I T I O N
Mona Kuhn
A Love Affair
May 28 – June 27, 2026
Opening reception with the artist: Saturday, May 30, 2026, 3–5pm
EUQINOM Gallery is pleased to present A Love Affair, its fourth exhibition with Mona Kuhn. The exhibition features a new body of work from the series Kings Road, centered on the historic Schindler House, and marks the San Francisco debut of a series previously presented at the Lianzhou Museum of Photography (China), Hsinchu Image Museum (Taiwan), and Kunsthaus Göttingen (Germany).
The series has received significant institutional recognition. In 2025, the J. Paul Getty Museum acquired twelve solarized photographs from Kings Road, affirming the importance of this body of work within Kuhn’s evolving practice.
With A Love Affair, Kuhn offers a lyrical meditation on longing, memory, and desire. Interweaving chromogenic color prints with solarized gelatin silver photographs, she constructs a visually layered body of work that explores photography’s ability to collapse distinctions between past and present, reality and fiction.
At the center of the exhibition are Kuhn’s solarized works, whose ethereal tonal inversions transform familiar spaces into dreamlike psychological landscapes. Drawing on a photographic technique historically associated with Surrealism, these images destabilize the medium’s documentary function, allowing light and shadow to become expressive agents of ambiguity and emotional resonance. Through solarization, Kuhn creates spectral compositions that suggest presence through absence, evoking fleeting traces of intimacy and memory.
Kuhn was immediately captivated by the Schindler House after moving to Los Angeles in 2005. Beginning in 2016, she embarked on Kings Road in earnest, immersing herself in the archives of architect Rudolph M. Schindler. There she encountered a letter signed by Schindler and addressed to an unnamed lover. This fragment of correspondence became the conceptual catalyst for the series, allowing Kuhn to construct a speculative visual narrative shaped by absence, desire, and imagined intimacy.
An enigmatic female figure recurs throughout the photographs, moving through the compositions like an apparition. Inspired by the anonymous recipient of Schindler’s letter, she hovers between presence and disappearance, introducing a cinematic tension that animates the work. Her elusive presence transforms each image into a scene suspended between memory and invention.
In A Love Affair, Kuhn extends her longstanding exploration of the body, light, and landscape into new conceptual territory. The resulting photographs are less about place than atmosphere—spaces charged with emotional residue, where architecture dissolves into shadow and fiction emerges through light.
W O R K S
A B O U T T H E A R T I S T
Mona Kuhn is an American artist, born in São Paulo, Brazil, of German descent, in 1969. Kuhn 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. Kuhn's works have been shown steadily, revealing an astonishing consistency in technique, subject, and purpose. Kuhn’s distinct aesthetic propelled her as one of the most collectible contemporary art photographers. In 2021, Kuhn received The Stieglitz Award for her contributions to fine art photography. Occasionally, Mona Kuhn teaches at UCLA and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
Kuhn’s first monograph, Photographs, was debuted by Steidl in 2004; 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 traveling exhibition shown in the US, Europe and Asia.
Mona Kuhn’s work is in private and public collections worldwide, including The J. Paul Getty Museum, the LACMA, Photo Elysee in Lausanne, the Perez Art Museum in Miami, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Kiyosato Museum in Japan, and Lianzhou Photography Museum in China. 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 in Los Angeles, and her works are represented by galleries in the US, Europe, and Asia.