Mona Kuhn’s love affair with Rudolph Schindler’s modernist LA dwelling

When German photographer Mona Kuhn visited the 1922 home designed by the Austrian architect Rudolph Schindler, she was captivated much less by its reputation as a premier instance of modernism in Los Angeles than a way of what it should have been prefer to reside there. She imagined Schindler, who had come to the town to work with Frank Lloyd Wright, having fun with the promise of the post-war period. His home was constructed on a dust observe known as Kings Street, which can be the title of Steidl’s ebook on Kuhn’s venture. It embodies his ‘house structure’, rooms that he designed to be open to the nice and cozy local weather with out of doors eating, heat wooden finishes and deliberately human, even cosy, proportions.

In photographing the ochre concrete partitions or tantalising views of the gardens, she conjured the determine of Schindler’s former lover, a girl whose existence she found in his terse letter ending their love affair and citing his marriage to Pauline. ‘It’s a mistake to position one’s entire world unto one level or individual – the world is endlessly huge – and life wealthy with out backside – you’ll find your treasures – with out me,’ he printed in tidy pencil on ivory paper.

Kuhn is finest identified for her large-scale suggestive or ethereal images of nudes, particularly ladies. She selected a radically totally different technique in these footage of the anonymous lover, making prints in a solarised method well-liked with early Surrealist artists like Man Ray. She needed to stay true to the aesthetic realm of early modernism to underscore her fiction.

The exhibition ‘The Schindler Home: A Love Affair’ options Kuhn’s silver prints of a slender magnificence, nude or in a chemise, put in in a darkened room in Galerie XII in Santa Monica, which is owned by Valerie-Anne Giscard d’Estaing. Color prints with particulars of the home interiors add to a way of voyeuristic intimacy.

The images have been exhibited in different establishments and galleries however this presentation is predicated on Schindler’s personal architectural ideas of house. Projections of the architect’s letters and blue prints illuminate partitions of the gallery with a sound set up composed by Boris Salchow. Kuhn hopes viewers will really feel immersed within the expertise of one other time and the lure of an unimaginable love. ‘I needed for them to seek out one another once more, a few years later, in one more type of artwork. It was the impossibility of their second in time that gave me an impulse ahead,’ she wrote.