Wesley Kimler
b. 1953, Billings, MO
Wesley Kimler is an American painter long associated with Chicago’s contemporary art scene. Known for works of imposing scale, sometimes reaching mural-like dimensions, Kimler creates forceful, gestural paintings that move between abstraction and figuration. His canvases are dense, physical, and emotionally charged, often combining sweeping brushwork, raw mark-making, turbulent color, and fragmented imagery into compositions that feel both theatrical and psychologically intense.
Kimler’s work resists easy categorization. While rooted in the language of Abstract Expressionism, his paintings frequently suggest bodies, faces, landscapes, interiors, or mythic scenes before dissolving back into abstraction. The result is a hybrid visual world, at once beautiful, grotesque, surreal, and deeply human. Critic Kevin Nance described his paintings as “expressive, gestural, hybrid paintings” that combine abstract and figurative elements with theatrical force and evocative power.
Over the course of his career, Kimler has exhibited with major galleries including Struve Gallery in Chicago, L.A. Louver in Los Angeles, Barbara Kornblatt Gallery in Washington, D.C., Paul Anglim Gallery in San Francisco and currently at Gallery VICTOR, Chicago. He was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 1995 and was included in the museum’s landmark exhibition Art in Chicago, 1945–1995 the following year. The 2020-21 pandemic era exhibition, The Long Dream at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago featured a massive canvas by Wesley Kimler
A fiercely independent painter and outspoken advocate for the continued relevance of painting, Kimler occupies a singular place in Chicago art history. His work is held in institutional and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
