Kevin Giese is a multidisciplinary artist whose deep interests in nature and in representations of the landscape are wide ranging. He is a highly accomplished furnituremaker, sculptor and drawer. Typically his artworks are visually restrained, deliberately pared down to capture the essential qualities of his artistic ideas and the subjects being rendered or interpreted. This minimalist design sensibility gives his artworks a commanding visual presence, and on a fundamental level explore the same great attention to detail that can be found in the material and drawn landscape. Drawing the landscape on-site is crucial to his process and over the course of several decades Giese has continued to refine this direct representation of the subject matter to explore space, form and light. 

Giese is an expert furniture maker, whose refined hand skills and meticulous joining techniques are witnessed in his latest furniture work “Meditation Table”. Elegantly designed and finely crafted using wood and stone, this particular design was inspired by the seamless fit of trees growing through bedrock. In a broader sense, Giese’s furniture designs merge both a naturalist and minimalist sensibility, privileging form and line as well and striving for an honest presentation of the core materials being used; ash, maple, walnut, granite, limestone, and more. Likewise, his formal sculptures and art installations reveal a central delight in nature and observing the diverse materials found therein. His larger scale sculptural works explore a personal and cultural interconnectedness with the natural world, which in turn he believes echoes the centrality of humanities place within a broader vision of the landscape. 

Kevin Giese received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1992, and his Master of Fine Arts degree in 2007, both from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Currently, Kevin is a Lecturer at the Peck School of the Arts, UW-Milwaukee, where he teaches courses in drawing and is the wood shop technician at Kenilworth Square East. A dedicated teacher, he has taught classes ranging from drawing to advanced woodworking. Giese has exhibited his artworks throughout Wisconsin and the Midwest in solo and group shows, including at the Dean Jensen Gallery, Cardinal Stritch College, Northwestern Mutual Life, Lawrence University, Inova Gallery, Watrous Gallery, Portrait Society Gallery, Charles Allis Museum, and Lynden Sculpture Garden.