Artist Bio
Paul Behnke was born in Memphis, TN, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the Memphis College of Art. Behnke’s paintings have been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally.
He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Heidelberg, Philadelphia, Saint Augustine, and Memphis, as well as group shows in San Francisco, Honolulu, London, Dublin, Paphos, Glasgow, The Netherlands, Cernay-lès-Reims and New York.
His work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic Weekend, The New Criterion and The New Republic. Behnke’s writings have appeared online at AbCrit: A Forum for Debate on Abstract Art, at The Painters’ Table and in print in Gamut a Southern regional art magazine, and No. Magazine. He was the co-editor of Shad Runn a self-published art zine in Memphis, TN.
He has edited Structure and Imagery: A Contemporary Art Blog since 2011 and was the co-director of Stout Projects exhibition space in Bushwick, Brooklyn from 2015 to 2017. Currently, Behnke lives and works in Taos, New Mexico.
Artist Statement
The paintings in this show were among the very first I made when I moved from New York City to Taos, NM in the summer of 2020. I believe they were an attempt to reject everything I thought I knew about New Mexico – the fabled light, the vast open spaces and the rich color that makes up everything from the artwork created by the Pueblo fine artists to the piercing color combinations of the ski jackets in the ski valley and the sky itself. And an attempt to hold onto the chill and grayness of my favorite season in the Northeast. In New York, I made color -seared, garish paintings with expanses of competing colors and bold, broad forms. If I had set out to make paintings in both locales that were the opposites of their environments, I couldn’t have done a better job.
These works are small and intimate. Understated with only accents of unmodulated color, the paintings remind me of what I appreciate about A.P. Ryder’s work, than the British Pop abstractionists that I previously felt akin to. This palette is grayed down, muted and seems to reference, of course, winter, loss, vacancy, twilight or early mornings in the fall. The palette still relies heavily on the interplay of opposites, but the paintings are keyed and rely on a subdued mood, a grittier feeling. The toned down greens, browns and grays are reminiscent of Freud, Auerbach, Minton and are similar in mood to the School of London.
While my forms still allude to previous content – Biblical and Pop Cultural references, alchemy, occult symbols and transformation – they have become less defined. The application of the paint became more slapdash and the edges blurred. The bombastic power of my earlier, larger paintings became subtle, subdued and subversive. Lines snaked along arbitrary paths or sometimes meandered or dashed through the meat of the looser forms linking adjacent elements – moving the viewer’s eye to better direct and connect a composition.
Oddly, in thinking about the line’s movement across the canvas, I am now reminded of a very early memory that I revisit often.
I am about seven years old, lying on my back in the middle of a baseball field next to my house. It’s cold and I can feel the hard ground through my dark blue corduroy coat and hood. The coat has a nutcracker type soldier sewn on the left breast. I am looking up at a dappled dark and light gray sky. In my field of vision, from my right a dotted line of black looking birds moves its way even further south. They are tiny and I feel sad they are going away.
paulbehnke.net
Listen to a conversation with Paul Behnke and Graham Dane on the KONR Out North Radio program Art Matters: open.spotify.com/episode/2ObBlakSQ5bFa7TrruYDhD
