INKA ESSENHIGH THE MADNESS OF SPLENDOR

By Suze e McAvoy

“My work embodies li le visions of the great intangible....Some will say he’s gone mad—others will look and say he’s looked in at the la ices of Heaven and come back with the madness of splendor on him.” —Marsden

Hartley

The path to Inka Essenhigh’s studio in Maine runs through deep spruce woods. The landscape is primordial. The studio, built in 2008, is a large, high-ceilinged room with skylights that let in natural light from above. Essenhigh has been painting in Maine for nearly twenty years, yet this fact is rarely mentioned in connection with her work. Perhaps because her paintings are not outward representations of the landscape like the paintings of many artists who have painted in Maine over the past two centuries. Instead, she looks inward. “I paint out of my head; that’s my modus operandi—all the time,” she says. Her practice is to meditate, envisioning a place, a scene, or a feeling that directs the work. “I know what I am going to paint. I hone in on the feeling and match the painting, the image, to what that is.”1

In 2006, Essenhigh made a conscious decision to “turn off the TV” and go inward. Her husband, the artist Steve Mumford, had been traveling to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003, making field drawings in hot spots such as Bagdad, Tikrit, and Baquba. His close contact with the conflict and the devastation of war were taking a toll. Her paintings from this time, such as Straight to Hell (2003), Brush with Death (2004), and Bullies (2005), were increasingly dark. Concerned that her art was adding to the negativity of the world, she instead decided to “paint the world I would prefer to live in.”

This shi in perspective prompted a change in her working method. Until then, she had been making paintings from automatic drawings. She would make a doodle, and wherever her imagination led, no ma er how toxic, she would follow it through. “It was self-generating,” she recalls. “I’d try not to edit myself.” The paintings Spring and The Grass at Night in July (both 2006) represent the beginning of the way she works now. Both are fantastical landscapes suffused with green growth and sinuous energy, a marked departure from the bilious colors and dystopian images of the preceding years.

Since then, Essenhigh has been “making paintings to be enjoyed, to live with.” Increasingly, references to her environment in Maine have entered her work, mystical scenes of forest, sea, and meadow, populated by sprites, gods, and goddesses. Diana, a vertical composition from 2010, is based on the path to the artist’s studio in the woods. The goddess of the hunt emerges from the forest to cast a protective eye over a fallen deer, both taking form from trees. These works and others in which flora and fauna are personified and the se ing is animated call to mind the work of the early twentieth century English illustrator Arthur Rackham, and his near contemporary, the Irish poet, painter, writer, and mystic George William Russell, who wrote under the pseudonym Æ. In her 2013 lecture, Cartoons and Myths: Reviving Pan and Diana for the 21st Century, presented at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Essenhigh read from The Candle of Vision, Æ’s influential 1918 text on creative visualization:

When I am in my room looking upon the walls I have painted, I see there reflections of the personal life, but when I look through the windows, I see a living nature and landscapes not painted by hands. So, too, when I meditate I feel in the images and thoughts which throng about me the reflections of personality, but there are also windows in the soul through which can be seen images created not by human but by the divine imagination.2

In 2015, a er nearly a decade of painting with oils, Essenhigh returned to working with enamels, the medium that launched her career in the late 1990s. Enamel allows her greater precision in line and definition of details and to build up color in multiple thin layers, resulting in flat glossy surfaces that lend a contemporary slickness to her images. “With enamel, I can change things endlessly,” she says. “That’s sort of the point. I end up repainting things a hundred times, but I’m a fast painter.” Still, with multiple revisions, it can take her months to complete a work.

When I visited her Maine studio in the late summer of 2022, she was working on the painting Earth Candy—“candy of the earth,” she called them—and offered to demonstrate her process. Using a wet sanding block and a rag, she scrubbed out one of the pumpkins she had painted, then sketched it again with a thin wash of color in a new location. “I organize the painting on a design level, a pa ern first,” she says, “then put the atmosphere on top of that.” She rarely makes preparatory drawings. When she does, they serve as “reminders of what things feel like, not what they look like.”

Forest with Dappled Light (2022), a sylvan scene she had started earlier in the summer and recently completed, was also in the studio at my visit. Taking center stage, a small chartreuse pine tree appears to piroue e, its candelabra branches twirling in the spotlight. Wildflowers and lithe, arabesque trees are supporting characters. The dappled light on the forest floor leads the eye deep into the woods, recalling the words of the artist Charles Burchfield, whose visionary landscapes she admires, “Walking under the trees, I felt as if color made sound.”

When not in Maine, Essenhigh works from her studio in New York, on the Lower East Side of Manha an. Urban references slip into her paintings, o en in the form of nigh ime revelry in bars, restaurants, and nightclubs. Rave Scene, a painting she began in January 2021, is a hypnotic New Year’s celebration that pulses with psychedelic color. Elegant, intensely hued flower people mingle in the foreground, observing the feverish crowd of pale pink and lavender dancers in the center. A trippy mix of Disney’s Fantasia, Joseph Stella’s visionary paintings of Coney Island, and Agnes Pelton’s transcendental landscapes, Essenhigh’s painting is a “metaphor for a blooming consciousness.”

Blue Mountain (2022) is another recent painting with a similarly otherworldly pale e. The mountain of the title, a brilliant plush cerulean, is framed by an arcing lavenderstriped cliff, seemingly made from pleated silk, and set against a gossamer pink sky. This confectionary landscape was loosely inspired by a visit to Kaaterskill Falls in New York’s Catskill Mountains. Considered a sacred place by the indigenous Mohican people, the site was made famous in the nineteenth century through the poetry of William Cullen Bryant and the Hudson River School paintings of Thomas Cole and

Asher B. Durand. Essenhigh’s version, with its undulating, exaggerated forms and shi ing perspective, shares more with traditional Chinese landscape painting and the exuberant, wondrously strange landscapes of the nineteenth century folk artist Thomas Chambers.

“Well, what about just pleasure?” Essenhigh asks in a video interview with Arts Magazine in 2021. “Like when we’re looking at a painting, we’re looking at the pleasure of the painting itself, and that’s what we really want, that’s what we really respond to, all of us.”3 Taking cues from the decorative graphic style of Japanese Ukiyo-e, her painting, Ki ens! (2022) offers shared sentient pleasure. The two young tabbies, one with grey stripes and the other with taffy brown and black patches, face off in a field of Queen Anne’s lace. “I just love them,” Essenhigh says. Sincerity, seen as a virtue by the Romantics, and now fraught with postmodern ambivalence, is, for Essenhigh, “a call to action...I believe it is cowardly for me not to be direct and say what’s in my heart.”4

Estuary, Yellow Breath, Floral Fireworks, and Flower King, a quartet of flower paintings from 2022, depict sumptuous, phantasmagorical blooms robed in Hartley’s “madness of splendor.” Of this world and yet not, the principal flowers in Estuary vogue in pastel finery amid a cyan marsh strewn with uniformly circular buds, portending a future of genetically modified conformity. In Yellow Breath, a sea of erotically charged carnivorous pitcher plants, at once beauty and beast, grow from the sulfurous dark water. In contrast, Floral Fireworks is a high-spirited cosmic bouquet, seemingly bred from a Whistler nocturne and a seventeenth century Dutch still life by Rachel Ruysch, channeled through the space age. Flower King, an amatory staging of the vernal equinox, is a regal showstopper of earth’s rebirth. On the banks of a small pool, the central flower is resplendent in a cloak of ermine petals, topped by a pussy willow crown. In the foreground, the Green Man gazes on wilting white tulips, evoking William Blake’s poem, To Spring, which invites the season to “sca er thy pearls, upon our lovesick land.”

Liberated from the exigencies of everyday life, Essenhigh’s animate and assertively beautiful paintings awaken the senses to the more-than-human world. “To return to our senses is to renew our bond with this wider life, to feel the soil beneath the pavement, to sense—even when indoors—the moon’s gaze upon the roof,”5 writes David Abram in his groundbreaking book, The Spell of the Sensuous. First published in 1996 and even more urgent in its message today, Abrams reminds us “that perception is always participatory.”6 Inka Essenhigh knows this. Her sincerity and her art are “a call to action.”

Endnotes

1. Unless otherwise noted, quotes by the artist are from conversations with the author in August and September 2022.

2. George William Russell, The Candle of Vision (London: Macmillan and Co., 1918), preface.

3. “Inka Essenhigh: In the Studio,” Arts Magazine, November 17, 2021, YouTube, 3:51; h ps://www. youtube.com/watch?v=ZcHIt34f7z4

4. Inka Essenhigh, “Sincerity’s Checkered Past,” Art21 Magazine, August 2, 2015.

5. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House, 2017), p. 273.

6. Abram, p. 286.

Suze e McAvoy is the former Executive Director of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and previously served as Chief Curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum. She has curated more than sixty exhibitions on the art and artists of Maine.

Inka Essenhigh

Born in Bellefonte, PA in 1969

Lives and works in New York, NY

Education

1994

MFA, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY

1992

BFA, Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus, OH

Solo Exhibitions

2023

Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO

2021

Victoria Miro, Venice, Italy

2020

Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2019

“Other Worlds: Inka Essenhigh,” Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, PA

“Uchronia,” Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL

2018

“Parallel Lines,” Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL

“Inka Essenhigh: Manha anhenge,” 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

2014

“Comet Dust & Crystal Shards,” Jacob Lewis Gallery, New York, NY

Columbus College of Art & Design, Joseph V. Canzani Center, Columbus, OH

2012

“The Natural and the Man-Made,” Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

2011

“Project Room: Inka Essenhigh,” Pace Prints, New York, NY

2010

303 Gallery, New York, NY

2008

Victoria Miro, London, United Kingdom

2006

303 Gallery, New York, NY

2005

Victoria Miro, London, United Kingdom

DA2 Domus Artium 2002, Salamanca, Spain

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

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

Group Exhibitions

2023

“Rounding the Circle: The Mary and Alfred Shands Collection,” Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY

2022

“Why I Make Art” (curated by Brian Alfred), Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

“The Supernatural in Art,” Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY

“Psychedelic Landscapes,” Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, NY

“If you forget my name, You will go astray,” Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA

“The View from Here,” Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME

“COMPETERE: An Exhibition of Artist Couples,” The Bo Bartle Center, Columbus State University, GA

“Empire of Water,” The Church, Sag Harbor, NY

“Disruption: Works from the Vicki and Kent Logan Collection,” Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO

2021

“Kavi Gupta at Regan Rohde’s Art & Conversation,” West Palm Beach, FL

“New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century,” UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA

“Wild at Heart,” Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY

“Landscape & Memory,” Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY

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

“Life During Wartime: Art in the Age of Coronavirus,” University of South Florida Art Museum, Tampa, FL

“The Figure in Solitude,” Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL

“Radical Optimism,” Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL

2019

“FIXED CONTAINED” (curated by Tomokazu Matsuyama), 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 Le ers, New York, NY

2018

“Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

“Parallel Lives,” Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL

“Le Nuove Frontiere della Pi ura,” 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, Massachuse s 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 Fi h International Biennial, Santa Fe, NM

26th São Paulo Art Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil

“Funny Cuts: Cartoons and Comics in Contemporary Art,” Staatsgalerie Stu gart, Stu gart, 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, Pi sburgh, 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

“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 Zi el,” Victoria Miro, London, United Kingdom

“Casino 2001, 1st Quadrennial of Contemporary Art,” SMAK: Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele 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, Sea le, WA

“To Infinity and Beyond,” Brooke Alexander, New York, NY

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

2022

Honoree, Artist x Artist, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

2019

Arts and Le ers Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Le ers, New York, NY

2014

CCAD Alumni Award for Excellence, Columbus, OH

SELECT COLLECTIONS

Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY

Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO

Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME

Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Miami, FL

Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA

Sea le Art Museum, Sea le, WA

Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY

Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

Inka Essenhigh

27 April – 3 June 2023

Miles McEnery Gallery

511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

Publication © 2023 Miles McEnery Gallery

All rights reserved

Essay © 2023 Suze e McAvoy

Director of Exhibitions

Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY

Publications and Archival Assistant

Julia Schlank, New York, NY

Photography by Dan Bradica, New York, NY

Color separations by Echelon, Los Angeles, CA

Catalogue layout by McCall Associates, New York, NY

ISBN: 978-0-9850184-0-5

Cover: Blue Sycamore, (detail), 2023