In her most recent work, Essenhigh has abandoned the process of automatic drawing as a method of arriving at an unexpected subject matter. Her diverse visual vocabulary acquired from years of free association is here harnessed into creating deeply atmospheric images which express a keen awareness of seasonal cycles, reminding us of our fragile coexistence with the natural world, but also its resounding beauty.

Held in 2021, the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and first at Victoria Miro Venice, featured new paintings from her ongoing series of botanical works in enamel paint, a medium the artist first worked with two decades ago.

These works meld an exuberant exterior world with an energetic interior consciousness. Whether painting human or other organisms, Essenhigh builds finely wrought narratives that, at times tinged with symbolism, can be read as spirited visions of the here and now. In these new paintings, flowers step forward, uprooted from landscape or still life traditions to become outlandish and feisty protagonists in their own right.

Exact and delicate in their execution, the motifs in these works depict a spectacular vision of nature and are complete forms in themselves. Eliciting a strange and compelling beauty, as critic Barry Schwabsky comments, they ‘might be growing on another planet.’ And yet, as the artist says, ‘they are based on real flowers because, no matter what I might come up with in my imagination, a real flower always tops it.’

The artist has described wanting to paint ‘what is unseen, to find the life within things and animate them.’ This force, these ‘secret rules’ in her flower paintings might in part be thought of as the actions of phototropism and transpiration, natural occurrences that, in the past, would have been explained through stories linked to divinity or spirit. Today, whether we think of them as esoteric or ecological, the invisible energies that pulse through our surroundings remain potent, tied up with vexed issues of what the natural world means to us, what we have done to it, how it will adapt and what will arise.

About the artist

Born in 1969, Inka Essenhigh lives and works in New York. She has exhibited at the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, USA; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, USA (2023); the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine, USA (2020); USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL, USA (2020); American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, USA (2019); Fondazione Stelline, Milan, Italy (2018); the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville (2016 and 2012); Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (2013); Dayton Art Institute (2011); Center for Maine Contemporaray Art, Rockport (2011); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007); The Royal Academy of Art, London (2006); Domus Artium 2, Salamanca (2005); São Paulo Biennal (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2003) and the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2003). Her work is in the collections of major museums including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Denver Art Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Museum of Modern Art / P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; Tate, London; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Recent solo exhibitions include Other Worlds: Inka Essenhigh, Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA (2019); Uchronia, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, USA (2019); Inka Essenhigh: A Fine Line, MOCA Virginia, Virginia Beach, USA (2018) travelling to Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Michigan, USA (2019); alongside Inka Essenhigh: Manhattanhenge, Drawing Centre, New York, USA (2018).

Artist website