Kohlmeyer’s career took off in the late 1950s with solo exhibitions in New York and Washington, D.C., and group shows curated by notable art critics like Clement Greenberg. In the coming years, her works were featured in institutional shows, including the Columbus Museum in Georgia, the High Museum in Atlanta, and the New Orleans Museum of Art.
In the mid-1960s, Kohlmeyer developed a style influenced by Mark Rothko, characterized by large, floating elliptical shapes. She later introduced organic forms within geometric frameworks, reminiscent of artists like Agnes Pelton and Georgia O’Keeffe, and created shaped sculptures with painted patterns. By the late 1960s, her work evolved into the Clusters series, which featured rectangular shapes against a grid and incorporated Surrealist automatism, inspired by Joan Miró.
Kohlmeyer’s work drew from non-Western art, incorporating elements from her collection of pre-Columbian, Mexican, and African sculptures. Her Clusters series led to the Synthesis paintings of the early 1980s, where geometric shapes floated in atmospheric spaces. Throughout the 1990s, her large-scale paintings featured bold, decorative forms, connecting her work to the Pattern and Decoration movement. Kohlmeyer also explored sculpture, creating installations like Louisiana Prop Piece with Lynda Benglis, and later, playful, emblematic forms inspired by Miró and Abstract Expressionism.
Kohlmeyer's work is represented in many private and public collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
