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RECENT PRESS

Winter 2025 Art Commissions, Words by Jed Moch for Family Style (02/11/2026)

An exhibition in Mestre tells about Munch, the currents he was influenced by, and the artists he inspired by Redazione for Finestre sull'Arte (10/26/2025)

ABOUT

Brad Kahlhamer (b. 1956) is an artist working in a range of media including sculpture, drawing, painting, performance, and music to explore what he refers to as the "third place"—a meeting point of two opposing personal histories. Reimagining a subjective vocabulary through a neo-expressionist lens, his work references hallmarks of twentieth-century abstract painting, such as German Expressionism, while incorporating highly personal iconography.

Drawing on his tripartite identity, Kahlhamer’s work navigates his Native American heritage, adoptive German-American family, and adult life in New York City’s Lower East Side. His initial work as an illustrator at Topps Comics, early exposure to Native American ledger drawings (which he considers to be America’s first graphic novels), and the artistic milieu of downtown Manhattan shape the language of his paintings and drawings. While referencing Native American history and culture, his work explores his own displaced identity and straddles notions of authenticity and representation within the discourse of Native American art.

At once a careful draftsman and an underground punk musician, Kahlhamer straddles many creative stratospheres. Kahlhamer’s work has been the subject of numerous solo presentations, including recent exhibitions at Galerie Sophie Scheidecker, Paris; Garth Greenan Gallery, New York; Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson; the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut.

His work is held in the permanent collections of many public institutions including the Denver Art Museum, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Madrid, among many others.

Kahlhamer is the recipient of a Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant (2017), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculpture Grant (2006), Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Rauschenberg Residency (2015), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant (2020), and in 2022 was a Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellow. He was a Visiting Artist-in-Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska (in partnership with the Joslyn Museum of Art, Omaha) and an artist-in-residence with The Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, France (2009).

Kahlhamer holds a B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Fond du Lac Campus. Kahlhamer has served on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts, as a Visiting Artist and Critic at the University of Minnesota, a Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellow at the San Francisco Art Institute, and served as the Alex Katz Chair in painting at The Cooper Union in Fall of 2023.

He currently lives and works between New York City, New York; and Mesa, Arizona.

RECENT Exhibitions

American Landscape Summer Show Extravanganza!
Andrew Edlin Gallery
July 1– August 14, 2026

ILLUMINATIONS
Anat Ebgi
June 26 – August 7, 2026

Cross Generational: 1950 to Now
Eric Firestone Gallery
January 31 – June 2026

General Assembly
Eric Firestone Gallery
May 23 – June 28, 2026

The Life Force: Portraits from the Amparo & Manuel Foundation
The Museum of Sex
April 24 – November 2026

INTO THE TIME HORIZON
Nevada Museum of Art
November 15, 2025 - January 3, 2027

Hold to This Earth: Works by Contemporary Indigenous North American Artists from Tia Collection
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Sat 13 Jun 2026 – Sun 18 Apr 2027