Kings Road, A Rudolph Schindler House

"Kings Road, A Rudolph Schindler House"

from Saturday, April 29, 2023 to Sunday, June 4, 2023

Kunsthaus Göttingen - Düstere Str. 7 · 37073 Goettingen

From April 29 to June 4, 2023, the Kunsthaus Göttingen will present Mona Kuhn’s new exhibition “Kings Road, A Rudolph Schindler House” – a photographic, multimedia and sound installation created in collaboration between Mona Kuhn and sound artist and composer Boris Salchow.

This is the first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany of this internationally acclaimed contemporary photographer. In experiencing the exhibition, visitors participate in Kuhn’s visual research on the Schindler House, the personal residence of famed Austrian architect Rudolph M. Schindler in Los Angeles, California. Completed in 1922, the house was conceived as a design and social experiment and quickly became an avant-garde meeting place for artists and intellectuals such as Marlene Dietrich, Albert Einstein, Richard Neutra, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Mona Kuhn begins her research in Schindler’s archive on the first floor, uncovering rarely shown sketches, photographs, and correspondence that provide a glimpse into the architect’s private life. Among other things, Kuhn discovered a handwritten letter the architect wrote to a mysterious woman, rejecting her romantic desires. The letter is a key entry point into Kuhn’s visual fiction. Other archival finds shed light on the American architectural scene of the time.

As in a play, the tension heightens on the second floor with a presentation of large-scale photographic prints. Using solarization techniques favored by the photo surrealists in the early 20th century, Kuhn brings to life an enigmatic figure that traverses time and space between the constructed world and its abstraction. The remnants of what was once alive in Schindler’s constructed world materialize in a series of photographs.

Image : ©Malena Graf, Kunsthaus Göttingen