Gary Kuehn was born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1939 to a working class family. His experience as an iron worker and a roofer in the 1950's and 60's was formative in the development of his
sculpture and shaped his relationship to the physicality of raw materials. He received his MFA in 1964 from Rutgers University where he went onto become a tenured faculty member in Fine Arts.
Although his work is often categorized as
Post-Minimal or Process Art, having participated in such groundbreaking exhibitions as Lucy Lippard's 1966 “Eccentric Abstraction”, and
Harald Szeemann's 1969 “When Attitude Becomes Form”, Kuehn's work defies the boundaries and limitations of a singular art movement. In 1992 when he received the Francis J. Greenburger Foundation Award, George Segal wrote about the “rule-breaking” in Kuehn's work and said, “Artists [like Kuehn] who don't fit comfortably into art historical categories have a terrible time.” Working not only across mediums, but also in varied modes of abstraction and representation, what unifies his work is the sensual attention to material and the authority of geometry. Kuehn is known to have said, “After all, it's still just a matter of sex and geometry.”
Gary Kuehn lives in New York City and Wellfleet, Massachusetts with his wife, the writer Suzanne McConnell. Recently his work has been exhibited at the Fondazione Prada, Venice; the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough; Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst, Ottendorf; and the Kunstmusuem Liechtenstein.
