Inka Essenhigh

INKA ESSENHIGH

INKA ESSENHIGH

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

INKA ESSENHIGH’S UNCANNY PICTURESQUE

By Jenni Sorkin

A figurative artist who crosses representational painting with the alluring symbolism of fictive worlds, Inka Essenhigh mines a personal iconography that builds upon layers of color and shape to offer odd and sometimes disturbing narratives of strange organisms—some human, others not—that linger in the mind, suspended in an excessive natural world. By design, rather than circumstance, she has made her practice a monologue of sorts: a single interior consciousness, as a way of rejecting the sweeping historical pronouncement that has so easily elided the postmodern accounting of painting as a medium. In so doing, she has made it difficult to classify her work: That is, she doesn’t fit into any particular school, group, or movement. That hasn’t stopped curators from trying, though.

One of the more ambitious attempts was terming her a Pop Surrealist. She was included in Pop Surrealism, an ambitious and thematic group show of nearly 70 artists assembled at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 1998. A contemporary show divorced from the academic history of Surrealism, it nonetheless sought to address some of the complexities that John I. H. Baur, the Whitney Museum’s mid-century director, had famously observed in 1951: America, with its sunny optimism and lack of antiquity, failed to “provide an atmosphere congenial to the dark dreams of Surrealism.”1 In her work over the last 20 years, Essenhigh has created canvases of substantial technical prowess, a lexicon of hyperreal nature scenes and otherworldly figuration that has been variously interpreted as related to Japanese anime, comic books, European fairy tales, and Disney animation. While Essenhigh is neither fully surrealist nor fully pop, what the genres with which she is associated have in common is a relationship to the uncanny. As found throughout Surrealism and other modern avant-garde movements, Essenhigh’s paintings are more episodic than those of many of her contemporaries, all of whom were trained to work in series, due to the overwhelmingly academic influences of conceptual art. Essenhigh has bucked this convention: Hers are tightly wrought, single canvases. They are also touched by a curious self-containment and the interiority of the force of imagination. Her paintings are dimensional narratives that require close-up viewing, creating a visceral dialogue, one viewer at a time. They are marked by bright, sometimes overwhelming, color and a

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Fog, Moss, Lichen, 2008 Oil on canvas 64 x 72 inches 162.6 x 182.9 cm

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decision to revel in the “little world” schema of psychological interiority. They hint at the fluidity between people and their things—and the imaginative spaces within and underneath the earth, where other little worlds buzz, tunnel, and build; where secretive disturbances bubble up, or mushroom overnight, becoming part of the Anthropocene, or human, world. This is what Essenhigh herself describes as wanting to paint, “what was unseen to find the life within things and animate them.”2 Thistle (2019), in shades of chartreuse and lime, has a complementary pairing of golden, buttery sunlight that melts into the deep left pocket of the canvas’s horizon line. In its pensive green languor, it is reminiscent of an earlier work in Essenhigh’s oeuvre, Fog, Moss, Lichen (2008). Somewhere between a weed and a wildflower, thistles are herbaceous and hearty plants that are considered symbolic of fidelity. In 1493, Albrecht Dürer painted a portrait of himself holding a thistle, which is sometimes interpreted as a promise to his fiancée and sometimes as an allusion to Christ’s crown of thorns (owing to the thistle’s inherent spikiness). This famed painting resides in the Louvre. The plant he is holding, known also as milk thistle, has medicinal properties; its seeds are collected and often made into teas or tinctures used to purify or support the liver. In Essenhigh’s painting, a large red hibiscus-like flower in the foreground nearly doubles as a butterfly. Thistle presents a pre-naturally still and stifling world, hot and muggy at dawn’s rising.

Full Bloom, 2020 Enamel on canvas 60 x 44 inches 152.4 x 111.8 cm

Essenhigh’s paintings take on the nuance of human ecology through hyperreal forms of nature and storybook fantasias that allude to the crisis of the everyday. Her works embrace the disorder and messiness found in life, and they often rearrange it into something disquietingly picturesque. For instance, another flower painting, Full Bloom (2020), depicts a tense floral arrangement: The surfaces of each blossom nearly cackle—Baudelairean, as flowers of evil that end in spikes and sharp edges, all angles and thorns, rather than the demure, rounded softness usually conjured. A callous lily replaces a calla lily; a blood-red rose crumples, surrounded by daffodil-like claws; and a hissing serpent peers out from a daisy-like flower, its face replacing a round pistil, couched in acid green petals. All the greenery and stems descend downward, swirling ominously in a glass chalice that ends in a sharp point, perfectly balanced upon a tabletop. Threatening and beautiful, the bouquet is an arrangement that seems to reflect the simultaneity of conflicting emotions, the so-called “joy and doom” found within Baudelaire’s poem, “Hymn to Beauty” or, as he writes,

“ Thou scatter’st seeds haphazardly of joy and doom, / Thou govern’st everything, but answer’st unto nought.”3

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Charles Meunier, Illustration of Charles Baudelaire ‘Les Fleurs du Mal,’ 1900

Through her deliberate and hyperbolic realism, Essenhigh’s flowers are ultimately granted a kind of poetic agency, in that they are transformed from passive delights into active subjects. As vivid messengers, the flowers transmit their dark beauty, insistent upon extracting an emotive response from the viewer, as though they might deliberately cross the threshold of the canvas and draw blood.

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For most of her career, Essenhigh has been highly adept at presenting lovely creatures in their own habitats: fairies and moon creatures that drink, cavort, parade, and sprawl in swirling, enchanted forests, apocalyptic nowhere spaces, and occasionally louche restaurants and bars. They are instantly recognizable post-humans who socialize, lounge, work, and drink, as in the canvas Chinese Mission Restaurant (2020), in which a blue mermaid-like figure plays server to two neon pink women who gossip at the bar of a Chinese restaurant. She is positioned in the mid-ground of the painting, her arms, reminiscent of the many-armed Hindu goddess Durga, balancing loaded trays. This rhythm is echoed across the painting: Opposite her, on a banquet table that separates two tables full of patrons, sits a tabletop figurative sculpture with arm-like tentacles in a parallel position; and at the forefront of the canvas, the cocktail’s stirrer and straw also mimic the mermaid server’s outstretched arms. Her oceanic presence and bright blue pigmentation is also registered in the objects rendered, such as the phosphorescent glow of the fish tank and the familiar square phone screen, another watery miasma that sits between the neon-hued pink ladies.

Submerged into fantastia-like surroundings, the interactions between organisms, human and otherwise, reveal a “cyborgian” understanding of the body, situated in the theorist Donna Haraway’s ideas of cyborg

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feminism, which reject the rigid boundaries between the human and the machine on the grounds that these boundaries are as a way of taking away the inherent naturalism and essentialist biological roles of women’s bodies. Pairing the human with the machine—or in Essenhigh’s case, the nonhuman hallucinatory realm between lived and imagined experiences—becomes conflated as a fictive realm or, as Haraway notes, “...pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”4 To this extent, Forever Young (2020), fuses plant and young woman, with an emerging bud doubling as a hair accessory. Nearly hallucinatory in its combination of green and orange-red, the scene is a domestic one, an update on the popular dressing room scenes of Post-Impressionism, in which bathing and primping became ritualized feminine practices. Here, a sinister devil child perched on the nightstand becomes a stand-in for the classic incubus of Henry Fuseli and a kindly Maurice Sendak-like monster is reflected back in the cracked mirror he holds up.

These layered references heighten the tension embedded in the painting, but recognizing them is not a requirement for understanding the basic trope of emboldened youth.

Essenhigh’s paintings revel in a somnambulist dynamism that sweeps the viewer through moody forests and indoor cafes in which alien life forms look up suddenly, as though seen for the first time. Her work posits the feeling of being half awake and in the twilight stages of dreamlike movement, a period in which consciousness is scrambled and the banality of the everyday is re-presented as alternative life forms seen, sensed, and felt.

Essenhigh’s paintings offer an animistic responsiveness in which plant life and non-Anthropocene beings become cyphers for human-like behaviors and feelings.

Jenni Sorkin is Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She writes on the intersections between gender, material culture, and contemporary art, working primarily on women artists and underrepresented media. Her writing includes Art in California, Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community, Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women Artists, 1947–2016, and numerous essays in journals and exhibition catalogues.

Endnotes 1. John I. H. Baur, “The Machine and the Subconscious.” Revolution and Tradition in Modern American Art (New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1951), 32.

2. “Ryan McGinness Interviews Inka Essenhigh,” Inka Essenhigh (Virginia Beach, VA: Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018), 193.

3. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (1857), trans. Cyril Scott (London: Elkins Mathews, 2011).

4. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991), 153.

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Dawns Early Light, 2019 Enamel on canvas 40 x 50 inches 101.6 x 127 cm

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Purple Pods, 2019 Enamel on canvas 34 x 32 inches 86.4 x 81.3 cm

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Thistle, 2019 Enamel on canvas 50 x 40 inches 127 x 101.6 cm

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Forever Young, 2020 Enamel on canvas 60 x 42 inches 152.4 x 106.7 cm

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Full Bloom, 2020 Oil on canvas 60 x 44 inches 152.4 x 111.8 cm

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Mission Chinese Restaurant, 2020

Enamel on canvas 40 x 50 inches 101.6 x 127 cm

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Orange Fall, 2020 Enamel on canvas 72 x 96 inches 182.9 x 243.8 cm

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Predawn in Early Spring, 2020

Enamel on canvas 50 x 40 inches 127 x 101.6 cm

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Blue Spruce, 2020 Enamel on canvas 50 x 80 inches 127 x 203.2 cm

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The Last Party, 2020 Enamel on canvas 24 x 24 inches 61 x 61 cm

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Born in Bellefonte, PA in 1969 Lives and works in New York, NY

2014 “Comet Dust & Crystal Shards,” Jacob Lewis Gallery, New York, NY Columbus College of Art & Design, Joseph V. Canzani Center, Columbus, OH

EDUCATION

2012 Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

1992–1994 MFA, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY

2011 Pace Prints, New York, NY

1988–1992 BFA, Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus, OH

2010 303 Gallery, New York, NY

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2008 Victoria Miro, London, United Kingdom

2020 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2006 303 Gallery, New York, NY

2019 “Other Worlds: Inka Essenhigh,” Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, PA “Uchronia,” Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL

2005 Victoria Miro, London, United Kingdom DA2 Domus Artium 2002, Salamanca, Spain

INKA ESSENHIGH

2018 “Parallel Lines,” Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL “Inka Essenhigh: Manhattanhenge,” The Drawing Center, New York, NY “A Fine Line,” Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA and Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2016 “Between Worlds,” Frist Center, Nashville, TN “New Work,” Honolulu Gallery, Zürich, Switzerland 2015 “Stars and Flowers,” Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO

2004 Sint-Lukasgalerie, Brussels, Belgium “Etchings,” Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York, NY 2003 Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL Galleria il Capricorno, Venice, Italy Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland 2002 Victoria Miro, London, United Kingdom 303 Gallery, New York, NY

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2001 “Works on paper,” Victoria Miro (Project Room), London, United Kingdom “Works on paper,” Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY 2000 Victoria Miro, London, United Kingdom Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY 1999 “New Paintings,” Deitch Projects, New York, NY “American Landscapes: Recent Paintings by Inka Essenhigh,” New Room of Contemporary Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY 1998 “Recent Paintings,” Stefan Stux Gallery, New York, NY 1997 “Wallpaper Paintings,” La MaMa La Galleria, New York, NY

32 GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2020 “Really.” (curated by Inka Essenhigh and Ryan McGinness), Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “Skirting the Line | Painting between Abstraction and Representation,” Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME “Do You Think It Needs A Cloud?,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2019 “FIXED CONTAINED,” Kotaro Nukaga, Tokyo, Japan “Not All Doors Are The Same,” Booth Gallery, New York, NY Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY 2018 “Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

“Parallel Lives,” Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL “Le Nuove Frontiere della Pittura,” Fondazione Stelline, Milan, Italy 2016 “Dead Among The Dead!,” Ellis King, Dublin, Ireland “Imagine,” Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy “Introductions,” La MaMa La Galleria, New York, NY 2015 “Eden, éden” (curated by Timothée Chaillou), Galerie Torri, Paris, France “The Ukrainian Diaspora: Women Artists 1908-2015,” The Ukrainian Museum, New York, NY “Painters NYC,” Páramo Galeria, Guadalajara, Mexico and El Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños, Oaxaca, Mexico 2014 “Disturbing Innocence,” The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY “Sargent’s Daughters,” Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY 2013 “The Golden Ass,” Blindarte Contemporanea, Naples, Italy “Cinematic Visions: Painting at the Edge of Reality,” Victoria Miro, London, United Kingdom “Pivot Points: 15 Years & Counting,” Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami, FL 2012 “Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination,” Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN, traveled to Winnipeg Art Gallery, Manitoba, Canada and Glenbow Art Museum, Calgary, Canada “The Sound of Painting,” Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana, Turin, Italy 2011 “Inka Essenhigh & Richard Van Buren: Un/Natural Splendor,” Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME “Inside the Painter’s Studio,” Stephen D. Paine Gallery, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA

“Creating the New Century: Contemporary Art from the Dicke Collection,” Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH “Counterpoint,” Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME 2010 “Between Picture and Viewer: The Image in Contemporary Painting,” Visual Arts Gallery, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY 2007 “Counterparts: Contemporary Painters and Their Influences,” Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA “The Game of Multiple Meaning: Symbolism and the Art of the Present,” Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Germany “Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY “COMIX,” Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark “Imagination Becomes Reality,” Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie/Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe, Germany 2006 “Painting Codes,” Galleria Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea, Monfalcone, Italy “The Compulsive Line: Etching 1900 to Now,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY “USA Today: New American Art from the Saatchi Collection,” Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom “Imagination Becomes Reality. Part III: Talking Pictures,” Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany “Motion on Paper,” Ben Brown Fine Arts, London, United Kingdom “Art on Paper 2006: The 39th Exhibition,” Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC 2005 “Life and Limb” (curated by David Humphrey), Feign Contemporary, New York, NY “Baroque and Neobaroque. The Hell of the Beautiful,” Domus Artium 2002, Salamanca, Spain

2004 “Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque” (curated by Robert Storr), SITE Santa Fe Fifth International Biennial, Santa Fe, NM 26th São Paulo Art Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil “Funny Cuts: Cartoons and Comics in Contemporary Art,” Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany “Perspectives at 25,” Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX 2003 “Painting Pictures: Painting and Media in the Digital Age,” Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany “Comic Release: Negotiating Identity for a New Generation,” Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, traveled to Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA and University of North Texas, Denton, TX “Supernova: Art of the 1990’s from the Logan Collection,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA “Reverie: Works from the Collection of Douglas S. Cramer,” The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY “Drawing,” G Gallery, Washington, D.C. “Heaven & Hell,” Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York, NY 2002 “The Galleries Show,” The Royal Academy of Art, London, United Kingdom “Pertaining to Painting,” Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX and Austin Museum of Art, Austin, TX “Jay Davis, Inka Essenhigh, Christian Schuman,” Angstrom Gallery, Dallas, TX “La Part de l’Autre,” Carré d’Art - Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, Nîmes, France 2001 “My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation,” Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, traveled to Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL; Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA; and Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL

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“Hybrids: International Contemporary Painting,” Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom “Braille,” Angstrom Gallery, Dallas, TX 2nd Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany “Works on paper: from Acconci to Zittel,” Victoria Miro, London, United Kingdom “Casino 2001, 1st Quadrennial of Contemporary Art,” SMAK: Stedelijk Museum voor Actuelle Kunst, Ghent, Belgium 2000 “Greater New York: New Art in New York Now,” P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY “The Figure: Another State of Modernism,” Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, NY “Deitch/Steinberg: New Editions,” Deitch Projects, New York, NY “Emotional Rescue,” Center for Contemporary Art, Seattle, WA “To Infinity and Beyond,” Brooke Alexander, New York, NY

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1999 “Pleasure Dome,” Jessica Fredericks Gallery, New York, NY “The Armory Show,” Stefan Stux Gallery, New York, NY “A Room with a View,” Sixth @ Prince Fine Art, New York, NY 1998 “Blade Runner,” Caren Golden Fine Art, New York, NY “The New Surrealism,” Pamela Auchincloss Project Space, New York, NY “Wild,” Exit Art/The First World, New York, NY “Pop Surrealism,” The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT “Summer Review, 98,” Stefan Stux Gallery, New York, NY “Celebrating Diversity: Contemporary Women Painters,” Hillwood Art Museum, Long Island University, Brookville, NY “ANATOMY/INTELLECT,” Stefanelli Exhibition Space, New York, NY 1997 “Sex/Industry” (curated by John Yau), Stefan Stux Gallery, New York, NY “The Art Exchange Fair,” Stefan Stux Gallery, New York, NY “Girls! Girls! Girls!,” Tricia Collins Grand Salon, New York, NY

1996 “Set Off: Inaugural Group Show,” View Room Exhibitions, New York, NY “Underexposed: Nine Young American Painters,” André Zarre Gallery, New York, NY “Featured Web Page Artist for December,” Artists’ Space, New York, NY “Night of 1000 Drawings,” Artists’ Space, New York, NY 1994 “Juried Group Show,” School of Visual Arts, New York, NY 1993 “Young Ukrainian American Painters Group Show,” Ukrainian Museum, New York, NY “Work-Play; Picture Thinking and the Analogical Imagination,” Visual Arts Gallery, New York, NY “Group Show: Inka Essenhigh, Stephen Mumford and Leemour Pelli: Paintings,” School of Visual Arts, Wooster Street Gallery, New York, NY

AWARDS 2019 Arts and Letters Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY 2014 CCAD Alumni Award for Excellence, Columbus, OH

SELECT COLLECTIONS Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Miami, FL Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

INKA ESSENHIGH 15 October – 14 November 2020 Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2020 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2020 Jenni Sorkin Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue layout by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-34-2 Cover: Orange Fall (detail), 2020