Eugene Von Bruenchenhein was a Milwaukee-based, self-taught artist active from the early 1940s through the early 1980s. Living in a modest house, which served as both a studio and exhibition space, with his wife and muse, Marie, he created a world of highly original beauty steeped in an idiosyncratic synthesis of non-Western art and architecture, girly magazine archetypes, theories of cosmic genesis, and current events like the Cold War fear of nuclear annihilation. Von Bruenchenhein was incredibly prolific and an artistic polymath, working across various media and subject matters including kitchen oven-fired ceramics; fantastical paintings of strange animals, the cosmos, and imaginary architecture; and erotically-charged photographs of Marie.

Von Bruenchenhein was recently the subject of a major retrospective at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI (2017-18). He was included in the 2013 Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace. Other recent exhibitions include The Alternative Guide to the Universe, Hayward Gallery, London and Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art From the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, both in 2013. Von Bruenchenhein’s work is in the collections of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC, among others.