Estiarte presents, inside X edition of PhotoEspaña (PHE'07), Evidence, the latest series of photographs from Mona Kuhn taken in the last two years in a nudist colony in the south of France.

Mona Kuhn (Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1969) lives and works in Los Angeles (USA) where she continues to explore her photographic work with human relations via a classical genre as is the nude.

In Evidence, Mona Kuhn introduces us to her private club, a nudist colony in the south of France where the artist spends her summers. By means of an exquisite treatment of light and colour, Mona Kuhn moulds the naked bodies in order to extract the adolescent petitioning of their ambiguous formation. The subtlety of the play of light on the skin, the placid setting under the sun, the intimate contact with nature, all leave a sensation that is unresolved, suggested, unimposed and highly elegant, as Gordon Baldwin comments in his text on the latest monograph from the artist:

"These tableaux, rendered in colors as seductive as the sitters are attractive, are set in luscious, soft focus backgrounds redolent of reverie. One feels that autumn's inescapable approach one would be very reluctant to be expelled from this enchanted environment, a paradise about to be lost. In the meantime one luxuriates in its splendid weather, letting its abundance of summertime daydreams ebb and flow like the tides of the nearby sea".
Gordon Baldwin: Before the fall, in Mona Kuhn, Evidence, Steidl, 2007

Since the sitters are not professional models and are photographed in their familiar environment, the result that Mona Kuhn produces shows an absence of any sentimental devices and they clear the emotional path towards a territory that is like Eden, angelic, divested of a narrative as colloquial as the torrid sexual pulsations. The poses and compositions of the sitters are natural but not vulgar, they shun sophistication but, in their spontaneity, they seem to us like sequences of a script with a strange and intricate dialogue. The looks of these youngsters, sometimes frank and direct at the camera, are devoid of any unnecessary tensions and they endow the scenes with a calmness and tranquillity that appears to be lasting. Displayed here perhaps is the myth of the adolescent, on the point of losing their purity, confused in a world of contradictions but safe in this garden of angels, of eternal youth, naked luxury which Mona Kuhn proposes.

Mona Kuhn was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1969 into a family of German descent. She graduated from Ohio State University and from the Art Institute of San Francisco. Since 1998 she has been undertaking complementary studies in the Getty Research Institute of Los Angeles. In 2006 she was a nominee for the photography award BMW - ParisPhoto. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions in San Francisco, Atlanta, New York, Berlin and now in Madrid. Mona Kuhn has produced two monographs produced by the publishing company Steidl: Mona Kuhn: Photographs (2004) and Mona Kuhn: Evidence (2007).