Victoria Miro is delighted to current new work by Inka Essenhigh. The New York-based artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery includes a physique of labor accomplished through the previous 12 months, that includes botanical, panorama and figurative motifs poised between an exuberant exterior world and an lively inside consciousness.
Inka Essenhigh’s work seduce and disarm in equal measure. Every portray is a whole world in itself, impeccably realised, ruled by its personal logic and in possession of its personal narrative. Every has its personal ecology and its protagonists – human, floral, or different. Every radiates its personal explicit high quality of sunshine. We recognise facets of those works implicitly: the pallor of fungal matter; the load of a poppy’s petal – even when that fungi begins to resemble the woodwind part of a ghostly orchestra or that petal appears to be migrating to human kind.
For the reason that artist first got here to prominence within the late-Nineties, it might be argued that our information of our surrounding actuality, whereas completely reworked by the velocity and availability of data, has solely grown extra fraught with technological and ecological change. It’s into these uncharted territories of notion that Essenhigh launches this new physique of labor.
Finding Essenhigh’s portray in time and place has all the time been a part of its problem and its attract. The artist paints utilizing enamel on canvas, its sheen for her representing freedom from the load of historical past. And but, exactly in its delicacy, its lack of ‘weight’, there lies an simple authority. Just like the seventeenth-century nonetheless life painters, whose powers of verisimilitude tricked the attention into believing not solely the veracity of their topics however that a complete 12 months of natural matter would possibly fruit and flower on the similar time (concurrently dishonest demise and reminding us of our personal mortality), Essenhigh’s facility confers a sort of factual standing on no matter she describes – whether or not animal, vegetable, or mineral and nevertheless faraway from actuality it would at first seem.
On the similar time, her virtuoso line – economical and suggestive, filled with whiplashes and arabesques – creates a fluid dance inside and between her motifs that appears to intensify a hidden psychological facet. Matthew Weinstein, writing within the catalogue that accompanied Essenhigh’s 2018 survey exhibition on the Virginia Museum of Up to date Artwork, notes that ‘her work aren’t simply plant-like of their nature. They’re plant-like surely. Their attenuated strains observe twists and turns that appear to know the place they’re going, like vines. We all know that vines have a plan, and the plan has urgency… It has a vitality with secret guidelines. It is not going to be denied.’
Echoing this, the artist has described wanting to color ‘what’s unseen, to seek out the life inside issues and animate them.’ Whether or not we think about the ‘unseen’, this life drive, to be organic or mystical speaks as a lot to our personal temperament as that of the artist. Essenhigh is not simply in these forces per se however in how and the place kind (pure or human-made) takes form round them. Manhattanhenge, a panoramic set up created for The Drawing Middle in New York in 2018, drew inspiration from the biannual solstice occasion through which the rising or setting solar aligns completely with Manhattan’s east-west streets; in Essenhigh’s work, structure gained giddily humanoid attributes. Buildings assume human kind, turning into towering, god-like constructions in a brand new cityscape portray, which seems as if a time-lapse of energies – esoteric, ecological or technological – had been pulsing by way of its arteries, the stream of site visitors merging with the paths of moon and solar, whereas crops flourish in synthetic mild.
If not fairly of this world, then which? As these new work clarify, resisting straightforward classification, finally Essenhigh’s work addresses the world of portray itself. The artist has talked of a want to create ‘a up to date and historic feeling on the similar time… the place you’ll be able to sense {that a} world you’re strolling into is primordial however that it additionally has the sensation of one thing modern and futuristic.’ Her work speaks to portray’s enduring position as a conduit between previous, current and future, in addition to its singularity in asking basic questions in regards to the world we dwell in whereas reflecting facets of it again in direction of us.
How work impress themselves upon us, work themselves into our psyche so profoundly that we see the world by way of them as a lot as we recognise the world in them, is probably Essenhigh’s overarching concern. Her work on one degree stand for a blooming consciousness. They prime the senses, heighten consciousness, intoxicate and transport, and in doing so awaken in us the need to look additional, query extra. We unfurl earlier than them.
A particular publication accompanies the exhibition, with an essay by George Saunders.
