Tom Knechtel

Tom Knechtel (born 1952) is an American visual artist and educator who makes complex figurative and allegorical artworks that explore, through a variety of mediums including painting, drawing, collage, and printmaking, themes of human vulnerability, animal nature, and personal grief using a rich, dreamlike vocabulary.

Early life and education Tom Knechtel was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1952 and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. His father worked as an aeronautics engineer, while his mother had studied anthropology. Although he did not initially show interest in the visual arts, his parents fostered his appreciation for culture. His mother introduced him to the works of William Blake, and his father to those of Jean Cocteau. During his childhood, he developed an interest in creating stuffed animals inspired by characters from his favorite books, including The Wind in the Willows, which he dressed in various costumes. He also constructed a small-scale theater, demonstrating a preference for designing plays rather than having his creations perform them. After graduating from high school, Knechtel attempted to start a toy-making business. However, after a few months, the business proved unsuccessful, so he enrolled in community college, which led him to move to Southern California, where he enrolled in the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where he first received his Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in 1974 and later his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in 1976.

Selected exhibitions In 1993, Knechtel exhibited at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery. The show featured his detailed, jewel-like paintings and pastel animal portraits that combined playful fantasy, classical traditions, and explicit yet tender eroticism.

In 1997, Knechtel had his first solo exhibition in New York at P.P.O.W. Gallery, titled Two Tales: A Ghost Story and Scheherazade, inspired by a "soul-stirring" trip the artist took to India. The exhibition was characterized by surreal, fantastical, and theatrical imagery that blended human and animal characters to explore the precarious balance between goodness and corruption.

In 2002, Tom Knechtel was the subject of a major 25-year retrospective exhibition titled On Wanting to Grow Horns: The Little Theatre of Tom Knechtel. It opened at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery in North Carolina. It later traveled to the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, the Contemporary Art Museum in Honolulu, and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. In these presentations, Knechtel structured his paintings like small, elaborate stage plays, aka “the little theater,” that were populated with a recurring cast of eclectic characters, wrestlers, and anthropomorphic beasts as implicated in the title, “wanting to grow horns." Knechtel’s characters often morph into hybrid animal-human forms or mythical creatures, and address themes of queer identity, desire, and the existential challenges of contemporary life.

In 2007, Marc Selwyn Fine Art hosted an exhibition featuring paintings and drawings by Knechtel. The exhibition's title and central work, The Walled City, inspired by Tibetan thangka paintings and Indian miniature painting, present an intricate surreal construct of densely narrative-driven visual worlds inhabited by animal-human characters.

In 2023, Knechtel presented his Drawn After Life at P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York, a body of work created over the five years since his husband, Rabbi Robert Baruch, died. The work visually explores the emotions of grief, memory, and survival, using vibrant imagery to show that the world remains jarringly alive even during periods of mourning. Sintra Museum of Modern Art, Portugal; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Orange County Museum of Art; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, COLA 2016, City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship and the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists.