Art in Lockdown: Inka Essenhigh

ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Inka Essenhigh (b. 1969) is renowned for her dreamlike paintings, which translate her intuitions and encounters with contemporary society into haunting, playful, sometimes disturbing visual scenes. Employing a mix of automatism, imagination and “inner vision,” she translates the visible world into arabesque enamel paintings that reveal the energy, feeling and mystery lurking beyond everyday life. Complex and always enchanting, her work explores contemporary culture and nature in magical, thought-provoking ways.

Essenhigh’s most recent solo exhibition, Uchronia, at Kavi Gupta gallery in Chicago, presented a vision of a hypothetical future in which humanity has resolved its troubled relationship with the ecosphere. The goal was not to present a complete picture of this idealized future, Essenhigh says, “but rather fragments where we have to wonder how much is symbolic, how much is abstracted, or how much is literal.”

“This Uchronia may have problems,” Essenhigh explains. “I’m not posing these pictures as definitive answers. I’m posing them as possibilities—a way to begin the conversation about what we want our future to look like.”

Other recent exhibitions include Other Worlds: Inka Essenhigh at the Susquehanna Art Museum, a site-specific wall drawing at the Drawing Center in New York, Inka Essenhigh: Between Worlds at The Frist Center for the Arts, 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.