Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Inka Essenhigh. The show will open on 15 October at 525 West 22nd Street and remain on view through 14 November. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Jenni Sorkin.
Over the past twenty years, Essenhigh has developed her own style and vision that she has put to use to create beautiful manifestations of the world: albeit one that isn’t completely free of evil. Rendered with technical prowess, her lexicon of surreal natural scenes and otherworldly figuration has been variously interpreted as related to Japanese anime, comic books, European fairy tales, and children’s animation. The works on view display storybook fantasias that often rearrange familiar elements of daily life or the natural world into something disquietingly picturesque. Her dreamlike paintings, populated with woodland scenes, Baudelairean flowers and mystical beings, offer an animistic responsiveness in which plant life and non-Anthropocene beings become cyphers for human-like behaviors and feelings.