Brett Reichman is a painter and associate professor at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he teaches in both the graduate and undergraduate programs. Born in Pittsburgh, he has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1984.

His work came to fruition in the late 1980s out of cultural activism that addressed the AIDS epidemic and gay identity politics and was curated into early exhibitions that acknowledged those formative issues.

Reichman's highly detailed, labor-intensive approach to realism addresses the complexities of identity politics. Through the post-modern staging of the figure in performative situations with objects, he questions societal norms by constructing images of exaggeration and artifice.

This inquiry into the politics of gay culture critiques political correctness and cultural assimilation through images that convey an amplified visibility and difference.

These exhibitions include Situation: Perspectives on Work by Lesbian and Gay Artists at New Langton Arts in San Francisco, The Anti-Masculine at the Kim Light Gallery in Los Angeles, Beyond Loss at the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C, and In A Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice at the Berkeley Art Museum.

He has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at Gallery Paule Anglim and Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco; PPOW Gallery and Feature Inc., in New York; and the Orange County Museum of Art. Reichman’s work is in many public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the Orange County Museum.

His work is featured in the publications Art—A Sex Book by filmmaker John Waters and Bruce Hainley, Untitled Publication (Red Square) by Feature Inc, Pacific Light: A Survey of California Watercolor 1908-2008 by the Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, and In A Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice, among others.