Artist April Behnke
April Behnke received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and has completed residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha and the Slak Foundation in the Netherlands. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including in Mexico City, Seoul, New York City, Berlin, Chicago, London, and Basel.
Her work is included in Georgetown University's art collection and has been featured in Chicago Gallery News, the Washington Post, Time Out Chicago, and on CBS News, among other media outlets. Behnke is based in Chicago, IL.
"In my work, I explore perception and visual instability through systems that are constructed and continually disrupted. I use repetition, alignment, and pattern as starting points before allowing them to fracture, shift, and dissolve across the surface. Order is never fully resolved, but becomes a site of tension where clarity and disruption coexist. Grids and other structured systems are obscured, reoriented, and interrupted. Through shifting color relationships, foreground and background often reverse, producing spatial ambiguity. These paintings ask the viewer to remain active in looking. Meaning is not fixed but unfolds over time through changing relationships between parts. In this way, the work reflects an ongoing interest in perception as an unstable, embodied experience."
Tell us a little about yourself (where you are from) and your background in the arts.
I'm from a small fishing town north of Boston. When I was very small, my mom's friend, who was a watercolor painter, gave me some paints and a space to play around. I've since been hooked for life. Because I grew up in a pretty traditional place, I didn't get exposed to contemporary art until college. Then I got my MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago which was hugely formative.
After a few years of those ideas fermenting and living all over the world, including in Mexico and Spain, I returned to Chicago, settled down here, and started to make my mature work.
What kind of work are you currently making?
I'm in one of those experimental phases right now where you can't really tell if the work is good or not, ha! It's exciting to ride the wave though and see where it goes. I had been using a pretty narrow palette for most of last year.
During this new period, I'm breaking out of that, making work that's generally brighter and more graphic, with elements that are a bit more loosely executed.
What is a day like in the studio for you?
I've got a toddler at home, so it's a bit of a choppy schedule right now. In light of this, I generally "work" in short bursts. My studio is a place to execute and my daydreaming, planning, and thinking happen outside. But when I'm there, I'm coming in ready! That's not to say it always works out, but it often does. Most importantly, it keeps things moving. I always need to have something in the works or I get antsy.
On typical days, I'm working on one large piece or a few small ones simultaneously. I don't like to spread myself over a lot of different pieces, as I benefit from focusing my energy in one (or just a few) directions. I find this quiets my mind enough that I'm able to make the connections I need to to get it right.
What are you looking at right now and/or reading?
I've been reading a lot of Slavic folk and fairy tales this year. My Dad's side is Polish and it's a part of our family history that's shrouded in mystery. I've been trying to learn as much as I can about the culture to reconnect us with it. The family line was there for who knows how many generations before coming to the U.S. and it seems vital to understand what that means.
Over the last few years, I've been working to clarify my work in the studio, to strip it of any excess. I see this as a parallel process, as in there I'm also trying to get back at the core of something elemental.
Where can we find more of your work? (ex. website/insta/gallery/upcoming shows)
Website: https://aprilbehnke.com/home.html
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aprilbehnke/
ai scientific figure generator is what I rely on in my own research work to turn raw results into clean figures ready for papers. I loved how April described building systems through repetition and alignment, only to let them fracture and dissolve — that push and pull between order and disruption keeps the eye moving without ever settling. Her honesty about a choppy studio schedule with a toddler at home was refreshing, and the shift toward brighter, more graphic work sounds like an exciting turn.