Leigh Behnke

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, National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of DesignMuseum; she has been Included in maj... or 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" (19801, San Antonio Museum of Art), "American Realism: 20th Century Drawings and Watercolors" (19857, San Francisco Museum of Art), and "New York RealismPast and Present" (19945, 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, Arts Magazine, 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"; writing about her cityscapes, John Yau called Behnke "an archaeologist of light, a stark factualist." In 2013, she was recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship; a monograph about her work, Leigh Behnke: Real Spaces, Imagined Lives, was published in 2005. Behnke teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and is married to the photorealist painter Don Eddy.Read More