This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Recognized for her representational paintings and conceptually based
images, Leigh Behnke is a painter, printmaker and art educator in the
visual arts.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1946, Behnke began her higher
education at Southern Connecticut State College (Southern Connecticut
State University), before transferring after a single year to the Pratt
Institute of Brooklyn New York. There she earned her Bachelor’s
degree in Fine Arts in 1969. She received her Master of Arts
degree from New York University in 1976 and, three years later, she
joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York where she
has continued to teach until the present.
Behnke began working in watercolor and later adopted oil as her primary
medium. With interest in the dialogue created by a combination of
images, rather than their individual significance, her compositions
usually consist of multiple, unified images. Early in her
painting career Behnke focused on theories of image perception and the
alteration of visual perception based on a single element, such as
color. An example of her work during that period is a watercolor
from 1978 entitled, Three Spectral Pairs, in which she explored
functional aspects through the gradual spectrum of color. During
the 1990s, she focused her work more on the basis of expressing
scientific concepts, such as natural selection, which she used for the
subject of Wallace’s Heresy in 1990.
Residing and working in New York, she remains active in production and
exhibition of her artwork. Additional exhibitions of Behnke’s
work have been held at institutions including the Springfield Art
Museum in Missouri; a downtown branch of the Whitney Museum of American
Art in New York; San Francisco Museum in California; and the San
Antonio Museum of Art in Texas.
Submitted by Jenna Wuensche, Researcher
Source:
Jules Heller and Nancy G. Heller, North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century
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