Kati Gegenheimer (b. 1984, Bucks County, PA) lives and works in Philadelphia, PA, where she is an Associate Adjunct Professor at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She received an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2013 and a BFA in Printmaking with a minor in Art History from the Tyler School of Art in 2007. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Kristen Lorello, New York, NY, (2024, 2026), North Orange, Montclair, NJ, (2022) and Gross McLeaf, Philadelphia, PA, (2021).  Group and two-artist exhibitions include Kati Gegenheimer | Chenlu Hou, Kristen Lorello, New York, NY, (2023), Mars in Cancer, David Peterson Gallery, Minneapolis, MN, (2023), Reveries, Peep Projects, Philadelphia, PA, (2022), and Good Pictures, curated by Austin Lee, Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY, (2020). Her work is in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Gegenheimer’s work has been featured in Sensus, Precog, The American Scholar, Create Magazine, and Maake Magazine, and she has been interviewed on Yale Radio’s Praxis Interview Series with Brainard Carey as well as the I Like Your Work Podcast. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in Impulse Magazine and Title Magazine. She has received grants from the Joseph Robert Foundation, Yaddo Artist Access, and smART Ventures, and has participated in artist residencies at The Edward F. Albee Foundation, Goldey House, the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, and Yaddo as a Pollock-Krasner Residency grant recipient.

Gegenheimer is a member of the National Advisory Council for the Berman Museum, Collegeville, PA, as well as the Yale School of Art Alumni Advisory Council, New Haven, CT.

Gegenheimer is represented by Kristen Lorello, New York, NY.

C.V.

  • “Here we see Gegenheimer’s paintings translating what I’d call a painful optimism. Hope isn’t corny; it is a choice. Gegenheimer is self-aware of the tropes and rabbit holes of girlhood. Of American society. Of life itself. She’s faced death and survived. Yet, she somehow paints optimistically, without being detached or uninformed.” Space on Space, Painful Optimism: Looking Within and Beyond the Girlish by Emily Elizabeth Logan.

  • “The titular painting, among the first that viewers see upon entering the space, is of a few bars of sheet music in bubblegum-pink and white, set against swirling chartreuse and teal iconography. The piece took Gegenheimer almost three years to complete, a testament to the value of starting over, she says, and the hopefulness and optimism that underpins her art.” The American Scholar, Portrait of the Artist by Noelani Kirschner

  • Gegenheimer featured on Yale Radio interviewed by Brainard Carey, November 8, 2024.

  • “The relationship between time and emotion is a familiar concern for Gegenheimer. The Philadelphia-based painter has previously taken calendars and clocks for subjects and seasons for themes, her lyrical style evincing how time registers as standalone seconds and evocative moments of joy, desire, or wistfulness.” Read More: Untangling Feeling: Kati Gegenheimer’s Passages (Leah Triplett, Impulse Magazine, October 29, 2024).

  • Solo Exhibition at North Orange, Montclair, NJ | December 5, 2022 - January 21, 2023. View the exhibition PDF.

  • “Gegenheimer’s buoyant canvases flip the script. They are pangs, bells, clarion and urgent. They speak to joy, practice antigravity, and slough toward a kind of animated pictography.”Read More: Reveries at Peep Projects: Wordless Symmetries(Todd Stong, Title Magazine, November 8, 2022).

  • “The mixture of duration and pleasure isn’t emanating from the painting, it’s lodged in its goop, through the maintenance of continued making of a wish (or making a painting) despite knowing better, in favor of feeling better.”Read More: Kati Gegenheimer, Pleasure/Desire/Playfulness(Zachary Rawe, Egged_on, November 6, 2022).

  • “In her show Stars Align at Gross McCleaf, there are keys and clocks and swans and gears and flowers and light in these paintings, and more than anything, love. These symbols form a kind of Tarot. They remind me of being twelve and seeing The Craft and buying that classic deck at the head shop in the mall and thinking—knowing—that I was tapped into the cosmic energies of the universe. My friends and I would spend hushed, ecstatic Friday nights in candlelit bedrooms conjuring the unknowable out of thin air, foretelling entire lifetimes for each other like it was nothing, making sense of lives we were just beginning to live, together.”Read More:Time, and My Friends (Michael Marcelle, Title Magazine, July 10, 2021)