Alan David Loehle (born 1954)[1] is an American contemporary artist and professor of art at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Born in Chicago, Illinois,[1] Loehle received his B.F.A. from the University of Georgia in 1975 and his M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1979.[2] He began exhibiting his paintings in Atlanta and New York City in 1983, and his work was featured in a 1999 print exhibition in the Paris Review.[3] He has been teaching at Oglethorpe since 2001,[2] and received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Painting in 2007.[4] [5]
Loehle's work, which includes both paintings and drawings, is characterized by its ambiguity and disturbing images.[6] A 2004 Creative Loafing article stated that his paintings are characterized by a "triumvirate of flesh: dogs, dwarfs and meat", describing his paintings as "...masterful ruminations on the slender cord separating life from death and humanity from debasement."[6] His specific works include a series of three oil paintings and one small ink-and-brush work, which he produced from 1997 to 2002 as part of a series centered around an achondroplastic dwarf model. These works include Walking Man, depicting an anonymous man walking on a desolate background landscape, and the Head, depicting the same model standing over a severed pig head. He has said that the images in these paintings are meant to symbolize the human condition.[7]