Art critic Roberta Smith has written in the New York Times that Ken Buhler’s paintings “are beautifully made and distinguished by an ambition to reduce nature to a state of luminous abstraction.” 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.
Buhler has exhibited widely in New York City and throughout the United States and Europe since the late 1980’s. 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 has been reviewed in many publications including The New York Times, Arts, Artnews, and Art in America. Buhler’s work can be seen in 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. He has been a fellow at MacDowell, Jentel, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and Ballinglen Arts Foundation (Ireland). Buhler is a Professor Emeritus in the Studio Arts program at Bard College, where he taught for 22 years. He lives and works in Brooklyn and in Masonville, NY.