Alan Loehle received an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Arizona in 1979. He now lives and works in Atlanta and teaches at Oglethorpe University. In the spring of 2007 the announcement of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Painting capped off a notable list of distinctions for the artist - a list that goes back to 1985, and includes two Pollock-Krasner Grants for Painting, an NEA Fellowship for Painting, and an Elizabeth Foundation Grant for Painting.

Alan Loehle has exhibited in New York and Atlanta since 1983, along with numerous museum exhibitions including The Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, NC, The Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AK, The Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, FL, The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, The Montgomery Museum of Art, Montgomery, AL, The Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, GA, and The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA-GA), Atlanta, GA. He was featured in a print exhibition of drawings in The Paris Review in 1999, and his work is in the collections of the Arkansas Arts Center and the Reading Museum, Reading, PA, among others. Loehle was featured in the 2004 Southeastern edition of New American Paintings.

NY Times arts critic William Zimmer writes in an essay on the artist in 1999 that "Loehle says that he knows a painting is finished when he can't leave out anything else. Such tautness ensures that a painting has all of the tension of modern life. [...] Alan Loehle's gift is that he can fit a large vision into a painterly scheme which he has narrowed into a blade."

Meanwhile, Loehle himself writes, "The intent in my work is to address issues of the human condition, such as awareness of mortality, the physical body, and unattainable desire. I seek to infuse my work with the inner logic of abstraction while referring more directly to the world by using a representational vocabulary. I often create multiple dualities in my paintings, both of associations and of emotions."