Leigh Behnke

Leigh Behnke, The Paradox of Infinite Regression, oil on wood panel, 12" x 34", 1999. Leigh Behnke (born 1946) is an American painter based in Manhattan in New York City, She gained recognition in the 1980s, during an era of renewed interest in imagery and Contemporary Realism.

Her paintings combine meticulous, realist technique, formal rigor commonly associated with abstraction, and postmodern conceptual strategies, such as fragmentation and deconstruction. Behnke's art has been exhibited by the Whitney Museum of American Art downtown branch, National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Design Museum; she has been Included in major exhibitions on American Realism and watercolor at the Duke University Museum of Art and Neuberger Museum of Art, and major traveling shows, such as "Real, Really Real, Super Real" (1980–1, San Antonio Museum of Art), "American Realism: 20th Century Drawings and Watercolors" (1985–7, San Francisco Museum of Art), and "New York Realism—Past and Present" (1994–5, Kagoshima City Museum of Art; Tampa Museum of Art).

Her work belongs to the public art collections of the New York Public Library, New York Historical Society, and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, among others, and has been discussed in Artforum, ARTnews, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Artforum critic Ronny Cohen described her work as a "sophisticated assault on the conventions of seeing underlying pictorial illusionism"; In 2013, she was recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship; a monograph about her work, Leigh Behnke: Real Spaces, Imagined Lives, was published in 2005.

Early life and career Behnke was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1946. During her graduate studies at New York University (MFA, 1976), she explored geometric sculpture and painting that was influenced by Hans Hofmann; a back injury prompted her permanent shift to painting. Art historian Virginia Anne Bonito wrote that in this work Behnke sought to create representational versions of Josef Albers's abstract, chromatic investigations (the "Square" paintings), colorist analogues to Muybridge's stop-action photography, and deconstructions of Cubism. In 1979, she began teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York City; she has taught there for four decades. This work examined the effects of carefully manipulated variations in light, perspective and arrangement on color, form, and composition, while also pushing value ranges and color intensity to rare extremes (for watercolor) through dozens of glaze layers, often requiring a month's time in total. Despite its realism, her investigations of color theory and "shadow dramas" of changing light

Conceptually, Behnke's work of this time confronted the incompatibility between the sculpturally solid and dynamic natures of reality, reconciling change and stability, as well as art historical strategies for capturing experience (Renaissance, cubist and futurist). Her oil paintings successfully adapted watercolor techniques—friskets and layered transparent glazes—that reviewers suggested endow the surfaces with a smooth, "mirror-like believability." and a "questioning aesthetic love." In her presentation of multiple perspectives, Behnke portrayed urban experience as visually complex—continuous, fragmented, dislocated, monumental and transient—and ambiguous in its effects: awe, pleasure, progress, disorientation, claustrophobia. Her 2009 exhibition, "Through the Looking Glass," focused on portals—passages, doors, arches, windows, stairwells—as vehicles for formal play and the evocation of imaginative and real dimensions and spaces; her work since then has often explored mythological iconography, as in Aristotle's Fifth (2016), which employs her tri-part, microcosm-to-macrocosm progression. Her work belongs to many public and private art collections, including those of the New York Public Library, New York Historical Society, Butler Institute of American Art, Currier Gallery of Art, Georgetown University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and Springfield Art Museum in Missouri.