Leigh Behnke
[10][25][30] 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.
[10][3][29][2] John Arthur compared her associative strategy to montage in film editing, which juxtaposes scenes to create new, unique meanings;[29] curator Christopher Young correlates her method to Ferdinand Saussure's semiotic theories of language and signs.
[27][10] By 1980, Behnke's work had evolved in three ways: she added oil paint to her repertoire, increasingly turned to New York City as a subject, and introduced a greater sense of temporality and unfolding, layered meaning through her use of the predella, a horizontal, multi-frame pictorial device of subsidiary, adjoined images often used on early-Renaissance religious altarpieces.
[2][12][10] Behnke's cityscapes used these formats in a similar manner, bringing disparate viewpoints (bird's-eye, low-angle), dramatic changes in scale, and tightly cropped fragments into dialogue with one another; critics Grace Glueck and Gerrit Henry wrote that the composite works expressed "the dynamics of New York City life"[42] and a "questioning aesthetic love.
[7][2][17][45][29] From the 1990s onward, iconography and narrative play an increasing role in Behnke's work, triggering senses of collective history, the past, and time in the dialogue between imagery; she has expanded its scope to include cosmological and natural phenomena, universal forms, and scientific theory.
[46][10][3] The images of her stacked, three-panel works, Sidereus Nuncius (1990), Interregnum (1995) and Blind Sight (1996), navigate and contrast varying rhythms, elements (land, water, air, light) and perspectives, progressing bottom to top from microcosm (fish, flowers, grass) to the human environment to macrocosm (the stars); such work often invokes scientific investigation and exploration: Sidereus Nuncius ("Starry Messenger") was an early astronomical book by Galileo Galilei, Wallace's Heresy references natural selection theorist Russel Wallace), and "blind sight" refers to pre-modern navigation methods.
[3][2][10] In the architectural triptychs, Archimedes's Dream (1998) and The Paradox of Infinite Regression (1999, above), Behnke explored complex, patterned spatial and geometric relationships and the mathematical form of the spiral or nautilus; critic Hilton Kramer called the latter work "a virtuosic pastiche of Futurism, Cubism and Realism executed with consummate skill.
[3][28] In recent years, Behnke's imagery has become more varied, incorporating a wider range of elements (carousels, ornamental metalwork and statuary), locations and formats (single-image works) alongside her characteristic studies of architectural spaces and exteriors.
[28][47][48] 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.
