In this painting, by Inka Essenhigh (b. 1969, US) the flowers present themselves not as elements of a larger landscape, or as decoration within the composition, but as self-aware entities interconnected with the environment in a luminous, dreamlike way. Essenhigh is renowned for employing a mix of imagination and “inner vision” to translate the visible world into arabesque enamel paintings that reveal the unseen worlds of energy, feeling and mystery that lurk beyond everyday life. Complex and always enchanting, her work explores contemporary culture and nature in ways that evoke in viewers something magical.

Recent exhibitions include a site-specific wall drawing at the Drawing Center in New York (on view through June 2019), Inka Essenhigh: a fine line, at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, the 2nd Berlin Biennale in Berlin Germany, and the Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil. Works by Essenhigh are included in the collections of the Tate London, the Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art / P.S.1, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Seattle Art Museums, among others.