Ken Buhler

Ken performed on stage for Seriously Entertaining at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater on January 21, 2020, speaking on the evening’s theme, “Feast Your Eyes.”

Ken Buhler’s paintings, drawings, and prints blend abstraction and recognizable imagery—often drawn from botanical or decorative forms—to explore the “terra incognita” of the natural world. Working with washes of bold color, meandering lines, stencils, and rubber stamps, Buhler creates images that feel at once new and familiar, revealing a world both luminous and layered. In recent years he has worked on print projects with Jungle Press of Brooklyn, VanDeb Editions of NYC, and Oehme Graphics of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. His solo exhibitions include shows at Lesley Heller Gallery, O’Hara Gallery, Michael Walls Gallery, and the Beach Museum of Art, Kansas. His work is a part of many public and private collections, including the Wichita Museum of Fine Art, the de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, the Maslow Collection, IBM, and the Ulrich Museum of Fine Arts, Wichita, Kansas. Buhler has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships from noted institutions including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1987, 2009), the New York Foundation for the Arts (1994, 2009), and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in painting in 1987. In 1983 and 2003, he was a fellow at The MacDowell Colony. Buhler is an Associate Professor in the Studio Arts program at Bard College, where he has taught since 2000.

In his own words: “Everything about these paintings matters. Every angle, every shape, every color, every line is integrated with the whole with such effortless perfection that to take them in is to be engulfed in their stillness.”