Brad Kahlhamer is an artist working in a range of media including sculpture, drawing, painting, performance, and music to explore what he refers to as the "third place"—a meeting point of two opposing personal histories. Reimagining a subjective vocabulary through a neo-expressionist lens, his work references hallmarks of twentieth-century abstract painting, such as German Expressionism, while incorporating a highly personal iconography.

Kahlhamer’s work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally, including at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, Minnesota; the Plains Art Museum, Fargo, North Dakota; and at LOOM Indigenous Art Gallery, Gallup, New Mexico. Kahlhamer’s solo exhibition Bowery Nation opened at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut in 2012, and was presented at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri in 2013. His work was included in PROSPECT.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, New Orleans, and has appeared in group exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Museé du Quai Branly, Paris, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2022 two solo exhibitions opened in Arizona, Swap Meet at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and 11:59 to Tucson at the Tucson Museum of Art. He is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery where he debuted Fort Gotham USA.

Kahlhamer is the recipient of a Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant (2017), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculpture Grant (2006), Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Rauschenberg Residency (2015), Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant (2020), and in 2022 a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow. He was a visiting Artist-in-Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in partnership with the Joslyn Museum of Art in Omaha, Nebraska, and an artist-in-residence with The Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, France (2009).

Kahlhamer holds a B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Fond du Lac Campus. Kahlhamer has served on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts, New York City, and the University of Minnesota as a Visiting Artist and Critic, and as a Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellow at the San Francisco Art Institute.