Michael Krueger (b. 1967, Kenosha, Wisconsin) is an American artist whose practice is grounded in drawing and extends across painting, printmaking, animation, and ceramics. Over more than three decades, Krueger has developed a richly personal visual language in which landscape, art history, counterculture, mythology, memory, and autobiography converge. His works often occupy a space between the familiar and the uncanny, using beauty, humor, melancholy, and visual seduction to create images that suggest stories without fully resolving them.
Drawing is fundamental to Krueger's practice—not simply as a medium but as a way of thinking. The accumulation of marks allows images to develop slowly and intuitively, with narrative emerging through the process of making. His long engagement with printmaking has likewise shaped his approach across media. Techniques associated with pochoir, stenciling, engraving, lithography, and other reproductive processes appear within unique drawings and paintings, giving his work a distinctive combination of graphic precision and handmade intimacy.
Krueger draws freely from the history of art and American visual culture. Romantic landscape painting, nineteenth-century printmaking, psychedelic graphics, popular music, vernacular photographs, cinema, and the counterculture can coexist within the same body of work. Figures and places may seem to belong to another era while carrying distinctly contemporary emotional or psychological weight. Time in his work is elastic: historical references, memories, dreams, and imagined events collapse into images that feel simultaneously old and new.
Landscape has become increasingly central to Krueger's recent work. Rather than treating nature as a fixed setting, he approaches it as an emotional and narrative space—a place where beauty can coexist with uncertainty, loss, wonder, and transformation. His landscapes move between observation and invention, often using shifts of scale, unusual color, and meticulously rendered detail to make the natural world feel both intimate and immense.
Recent works have deepened this engagement with landscape, storytelling, and the passage of time. Across paintings and drawings, natural environments become stages for encounters between the personal and the universal, the remembered and the imagined. The specificity and intimacy of Krueger's mark-making coexist with a growing sense of scale and mystery, allowing landscape to become a vehicle for contemplating memory, mortality, longing, and the unknowable forces surrounding human experience.
Krueger's work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally, appearing in more than 300 exhibitions. Institutional presentations have included The Drawing Center, New York; Denver Art Museum; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; City of Fukui Art Museum, Japan; Glasgow Print Studio, Scotland; Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque; Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium; and Kala Art Institute, Berkeley. His international exhibition history also includes presentations in Belgium, Paraguay, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Italy, and Japan.
Haw Contemporary has maintained a sustained relationship with Krueger for more than a decade, presenting seven solo exhibitions that trace the evolution of his work from drawing and printmaking into increasingly ambitious painting and landscape-based practices: See Be (2015), summer winter fall spring (2017), Palisades Park (2018), (Just Like) Starting Over (2021), untie the spell (2023), Carried Away by the Sea (2024), and Leaving Gustopher (2026). See Be marked both Krueger's first solo exhibition with Haw Contemporary and his first exhibition devoted to paintings.
Krueger's work is held in significant public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Denver Art Museum; Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence; RISD Museum, Providence; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; New York Public Library; and the Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn. His work is also represented in the collections of Monticello, Frans Masereel Centrum, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and numerous corporate and private collections.
Krueger has received numerous fellowships, residencies, and awards, including a Tamarind Institute artist residency, a Guest Master Printer Fellowship at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, residencies at the Frans Masereel Centrum, a Keeler Professorship, and a Hall Center for the Humanities Creative Work Fellowship. He has shared his research through lectures, workshops, and visiting-artist programs at institutions throughout the United States and internationally.
Krueger received his BFA in Printmaking and Drawing from the University of South Dakota and his MFA in Printmaking and Drawing from the University of Notre Dame. He is Professor of Art at the University of Kansas.
