Inka Essenhigh by Miles McEnery Gallery

INKA ESSENHIGH

Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art

CONTENTS FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS By Alison Byrne 5

INKA ESSENHIGH: A FINE LINE By Heather Hakimzadeh 7

INKA ESSENHIGH By Matthew Weinstein 15

PLATES 23 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 187

RYAN McGINNESS INTERVIEWS INKA ESSENHIGH 189

EXHIBITIONS AND COLLECTIONS 212

FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS By Alison Byrne

I still remember the first time I saw an Inka Essenhigh painting in person. It was on a visit to our neighboring museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, in 2003. Green Wave, 2002 (page 55) was captivating, filled with energy, wonder, and possibilities. The painting had a unique story to tell. Here at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) we’ve been following this artist’s story ever since. In 2007, MOCA included Essenhigh in a group exhibition titled Counterparts: Contemporary Painters and Their Influences. This ambitious exhibition highlighted the work of eight painters alongside their self-selected artistic influence. Inka chose Henri de ToulouseLautrec, and her painting Setting Sun, 2005 (page 67) hung alongside a lithograph by ToulouseLautrec. Our staff marveled, as visitors of all ages found ways to connect with Essenhigh’s work. It sparked fascinating conversations about nature, humanity, dreams, and reality. As a museum dedicated to educating the public about the significant art of today, it was time for us to revisit Essenhigh’s oeuvre with a solo exhibition. Inka Essenhigh: A Fine Line features a selection of works from 2009 to 2016, representing the artist’s evolution over the past decade. I hope that visitors who experience this exhibition find personal connections and leave with, as Inka says, “more magic in their own everyday life.”1 Our immense gratitude goes to the artist for her collaboration with MOCA staff and her commitment to this exhibition, this monograph, and related educational programming. MOCA’s curator, Heather Hakimzadeh, is to be commended for her dedication to this exhibition. Her thoughtful essay in this accompanying monograph provides new insights into Inka’s work, as does the essay of the writer and artist Matthew Weinstein, to whom we are most grateful.

Special thanks to the artist Ryan McGinness for conducting two extensive and revealing interviews with Inka. Condensed versions of the interviews are featured in this publication. This exhibition and monograph would not have been possible without the support of Miles McEnery Gallery in New York, the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, the Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Capital Group Companies, and the Rutter Family Art Foundation. I especially want to thank Miles McEnery at Miles McEnery Gallery for his unwavering dedication to the exhibition and to this monograph. Special thanks also to Rachel Taylor at the Victoria Miro Gallery; Richard Edwards at the Baldwin Gallery; Scott Duncan, MOCA trustee; and Meredith and Brother Rutter of the Rutter Family Art Foundation. Without their collaboration and support, we would not have been able to plan the extensive exhibition and this monograph. Sincere thanks to all the lenders, including Kevin Jennings and the Jacob Lewis Gallery, for their willingness to share these incredible paintings. Virginia MOCA is proud to present Inka Essenhigh: A Fine Line and document it in this monograph. n (Endnote) 1 Smithsonian American Art Museum, Video

Alison Byrne is a director of exhibitions and education at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art.

INKA ESSENHIGH: A FINE LINE By Heather Hakimzadeh

Inka Essenhigh’s paintings embody the extraordinary. In today’s contemporary art world, intellectually stimulating paintings abound, but painting that stirs both interest and emotion is rare. Inka Essenhigh: A Fine Line explores the artist’s evolution within her chosen medium of painting in the past ten years. The apt double entendre of the exhibition’s title references her constant experimentation, which routinely challenges her own expectations. Her endeavors have resulted in a steady evolution: an expansion of pictorial language instigated through either a difference in painting media, an approach in building compositions, or an individual shift in outlook. Yet, despite the regular stressors she places on her relationship with her media and her changing needs of expression, she has maintained a consistency throughout her body of work. Her draftsmanship is impeccable. There is an organic, irregular, yet elegant line that carries through from one avenue of investigation to the next. Essenhigh’s dialectic with her media and her subject matter has produced an extensive evolution in her work. But the conversation remains interesting throughout, and it is a conversation well worth having. It should be noted that Essenhigh’s method of exploration does not consciously attempt to innovate in the larger context of the history of painting. She does not try to test or stretch a social construct or convention. Nor does she engage in an ontological debate about painting itself. Her evolution has been much more personal. She chose painting as her medium, and she prefers to test her relationship with it as part of her studio practice. She switches types of paint and substrates, both to challenge herself and to better serve her desire to create. To allow broad transformation in both style and method can be a radical act for an artist, especially one who has achieved Essenhigh’s level of success. From early on in her

career, art institutions (both national and international) have collected and shown her work. She could have stayed the course, creating new paintings in the same style and introducing modest changes in a slow, safe, evolutionary manner. But her restless, inquisitive energy is not suited for stasis. Instead, she treats us to something both intimate and progressive. Her paintings are honest, fresh, and engaging on both a formal level and within the scope of each work’s substantive content. Essenhigh’s willingness to vary her approach surfaced early in her career. It first happened a few years after she finished graduate school at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She was earning a living as a fabric pattern designer and continuing with her studio practice. Although she was predisposed to painting figuratively, she felt compelled to paint in the abstract, in keeping with the dialogue of painting’s death/resurrection/salvation that was taking place in the late ’90s. She was unsatisfied with her work, however. She realized that the patterns she was developing as a fabric designer were more compelling than her studio work. So she switched, acknowledging that, for her, figurative art was more engaging and rewarding. She began to make two-dimensional paintings with a recognizable reference to the fabric patterns she designed, and she approached composition without a specific plan in mind. Instead, she employed a process of automatic drawing in which her random line work dictated the composition, so there was a decided nod to modernism in her investigation of line, space, and color. During this time, she was using an enamel paint brand called One Shot. This brand provides a smooth, glossy finish and is easy to sand down if a painting takes an unsuccessful turn. The resulting paintings contained large planes of flat color, and the space contained was shallow and untethered. The figures within the paintings had twisted, tortured bodies, at the mercy of the curving arabesques of Essenhigh’s line. The subject matter imbedded within the glossy, smooth surfaces reflected a jaded eye toward the shallow end of late ’90s contemporary culture. Her critique was cutting and quick, with each painting acting as an insight into the special brands of first-world dilemmas. Her protagonists had pulled, abstracted forms, usually without distinguishing features (like a head), which helped to limit their narrative assertion. The muted and acidic colors of her palette heightened tension and discomfort.

Typical of her work during this time is Plastic Surgery and Gym, 1999 (page 35). The painting contains a large, orange, torso-like figure, which lifts out of the center of the canvas. Large flaps of shaped and sculpted flesh are kept in place with staples or other bits of metal. The figure is tight and curled, like a closed fist. A spit-like structure holds the entire work in place, as if it were a suckling pig. Surrounding the torso are other bodies in various states of reconstruction. Machines and chemicals circle the figure, all designed to shape a body into something new and different. The image invokes anxiety. We become witnesses to an angst-ridden community desperate to carve a better reality. As one century ended and the next began, the uneasy tension in Essenhigh’s early work continued to assert itself, but within an expanded pictorial language. She shifted from the flattened colored expanses of enamels to a more painterly approach of traditional oils. She added a broader range of tones to her palette, which helped to create a sense of distance and openness. The shallow field of depth in her earlier pieces dissolved, and her horizon moved into deep space. The figures within also seemed to blossom and grow—limbs stretched out like manic tentacles reaching further into the space. She took a further leap and allowed a more pronounced narrative to creep into her paintings. Figures interacted with each other, and detailed backgrounds provided a context for the keen tension. The post 9/11 world, with its accompanying anxieties, haunted each work. Essenhigh’s spouse is a fellow artist, and his work sometimes took him into Afghanistan and Iraq. She filtered the stress of living in a terrorist-infused world into large dark canvases. Typical of her work at this time is Brush with Death, 2004 (page 63). A large whiteand-gray figure fills the center of the canvas. His mouth is open in silent scream and his limbs are dissolving into tendrils as he rushes up and away from the clutches of a bony, armed grim reaper. The palette of Brush with Death is typical of Essenhigh during the then-new reality of America’s war on terror: a high relief of black, white, and grays. The sporadic insertions of pale colors, maybe blue or pink, heighten the disquiet rather than mitigate it. While Essenhigh explores materiality or formal considerations, her intuitive working style often reveals fleeting glimpses of personal history. This can be perilous territory for an artist who paints. Painting as a medium is too known and too owned to avoid harsh scrutiny.

Heartfelt emotion is rarely welcomed or celebrated. A cynical art community does not tolerate sentimentality. Yet Essenhigh avoids this pitfall. Her focus is on a state of mind, rather than on specifics. Her abstracted figures and exaggerated beings represent ideas or a state of mind rather than intimate details of her life. She communicates ideas and impressions without pushing us to explicit conclusions. Because her approach is intuitive and shifting, it is also authentic and earnest. Her impressions and experiences are shared, rather than dissected or deconstructed. In this nascent century, the world became more connected and much scarier. Just as Essenhigh’s figures moved from tightly wound knots to expansive, far-reaching masses, so went our collective perceptions of threats and dangers. For many of us who had to adjust to a new, darker reality, these haunted visions dominated for only so long. Unending news cycles spelling out our failures and self-induced catastrophes wore on our collective psyche, and eventually, we had to change the channel. This appears to have been the case for Essenhigh, because her paintings took another compositional turn in 2005-6. Her paintings became lighter and more joyful: images of the turning seasons, with lush green summers, frosty blue winters, and golden sunsets. She was still painting colder, more rigid city scenes, but now there seemed to be an easing of the lurking darkness. Just as she could share her fears and demons, she was able to make images that expressed happiness and beauty. In 2011, Essenhigh made another significant change to her art production. Pregnant with her son, she found painting difficult and laborious. She had the opportunity to work with a print shop, which provided her with working space and assisted her with the more physical aspects of printmaking. Compared to painting, it was an efficient way to work and to tease out ideas. Living Forest, 2011 (page 113), a drypoint etching, evokes the eerie path in Snow White’s haunted forest. With sharp, expressive lines, the deep blue tunnel of trees and gnarled limbs leads to a bright yellow clearing. In the painted monotype Little Pearl, 2012 (page 125), a tiny baby emerges from the pink center of a clamshell. In the distance, a tentacle emerges from or retreats into the water. In terms of style, Essenhigh’s print work is among her most “painterly” work to date. It introduces clear brushwork and scumbling into Essenhigh’s painting lexicon.

This time in Essenhigh’s life marked a new creative age for the artist. The prints she made were of a much smaller scale than her earlier paintings. She executed them in a short amount of time and in a medium that was somewhat unforgiving, as ink on paper does not allow for corrections. Each work was either a success or failure. Her prints sometimes acted as studies for paintings that she made later, but they also signaled a new approach to her work. Essenhigh’s next series clearly delineated the prints as a jumping-off point in this new direction. She created several large-scale paintings of oil on paper. Where the prints are small and tight, the paintings are monumental and open. That’s because the prints demand a finality in process. Printing-plate composition cannot be continuously reworked. Paper is a porous material. Once oil paint is soaked into paper, it will not move. Paper is also delicate, unable to stand up to sanding or overpainting. If laying paint down on paper is a commitment, then Essenhigh’s oil-on-paper paintings demonstrate a monumental dedication. They have intense hues and open compositions, and they radiate hope. One of her larger paintings to date, Aquarius, 2014 (page 133), is a triptych. In the central panel, a feminine figure stands in the surf on a beach, her face turned heavenward. In her hands, she holds glowing objects, while at her feet a face melts into the surf. A boy and girl peer out from the rocks to her right. A large cerulean sky dotted with pale yellow celestial wonders dominates the entire painting. The triangular composition of each panel grounds the scene, which might otherwise be overrun by the movement of the stars and surf. Aquarius is engaging on many levels; it is well executed and, above all, it is beautiful. To create beauty can be both a brave and a radical act. Essenhigh’s willingness to follow her own intuition regarding art making gives her a unique voice. Today, Essenhigh continues to refine her pictorial language. She has reintroduced enamels to her practice, and she often combines them with traditional oils. She has developed a sophisticated system of painting that can flex back and forth, depending on her desire. Essenhigh paints in both Maine and in her studio in New York City. Her locations are often reflected in her rural landscapes or her involved city scenes. The rural images, in particular, are fanciful, often containing gods, goddesses, and other minor deities connected to nature.

Trees literally and figuratively loom large in her compositions, with snaking, tangling limbs that are like gnarled claws. In Fairy Procession, 2016 (page 153), a tree acts as an anchor to the entire composition. It dominates the left half of the painting as supernatural creatures curl around the limbs and the base, acting as both peer and foil to the fairy folk. The palette is consistent with other Essenhigh natural landscapes, with watery shades of blues, greens, and purples. The raised glasses and the dancing, tumbling bodies suggest wit and joyous excess. Another natural scene, Forgotten Cemetery, 2016 (page 155), stands in opposition to Fairy Procession, with its softer, greener, and more gentle approach. While Fairy Procession is a combination of enamel and traditional oils, Forgotten Cemetery is pure enamel, both contain Essenhigh’s sinuous line. Throughout, Essenhigh treats her features of the natural world with a much gentler hand than she uses for her figures. She bounds bodies with a hard line, separating their forms from the world that holds them. The progression of viewing one painting to the next becomes a conversation detailing Essenhigh’s decisions. Four paintings show a clear example of this: The soft curving greenery of Forgotten Cemetery reaches out to the tall evergreens and the fragile leaves of the dominating white tree in Seaside Cemetery, 2016 (page 165). The same white tree from Seaside Cemetery echoes in Power Plant, 2016 (page 163), along with the outlined forms of the entry gate and fanciful dancing figures. In this work, curvilinear trees and greenery dance around an anthropomorphic building. A glowing, semitransparent mass floats out the front door. Although it is like the cemetery paintings, Power Plant contains a bucolic setting; its flat, gray-pink sky, set against the escaping pale green mass and the straight lines of the fence, create a greater sense of urgency and apprehension. From Power Plant, the conversation moves to New Condos, 2016 (page 159). Gone are the soft tonalities of the other works. Instead, a field of highrise condominiums morph into seductive beings. Each lush building is a siren’s call, as are opulent buildings in gentrified urban neighborhoods all over the world. Flat yellows, greens, and grays define the buildings that retreat into deep space. Both harmonious and sordid, they make us aware of the artist’s opinion on unabated commercial development. But that is how the conversation meanders: back and forth, flat and deep, smooth and

textured. Essenhigh has encoded a personal system for conveying a feeling, an image, or a sentiment. Although the language evolves, it is traceable. The artist blazes a clever, masterful, and alluring path. Writers and critics have used many different historical references when writing about Essenhighâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work: Japanimation, woodblock prints, Arabic miniatures, chinois screens, contemporary cartoons, Toulouse-Lautrec, Aubrey Beardsley, El Greco, Thomas Hart Benton, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Francis Bacon, and Salvador DalĂ, just to name a few. This lack of consensus is interesting. As both a moving target and an artist who, in an earnest way, heeds her own intuition, Essenhigh defies the confines of easy categorization. She has collapsed many of the conventional ideals of high/low and modern/postmodern. Her paintings are sophisticated and well considered, as well as engaging and sincere. When we worry about the death of painting or following the trends of a capricious art market, we are doing ourselves a disservice. Perhaps we should move past the indifferent and the ironicâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and settle on what makes us to look more closely. In that context, Essenhigh delivers. n 13

Heather Hakimzadeh is a curator at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art.

INKA ESSENHIGH By Matthew Weinstein

Flowers are like flames which are like birds which are like people which are like trees. Solid forms behave like liquid. Liquids and gases become more solid. Even light becomes an object that acts like a character in a narrative. All of these things fluid; dancing around and interacting with each other in paisley-like and curvilinear patterns. —Inka Essenhigh IT PAINTS: 15

Michael Marder in his essay “What Is Plant Thinking?” attempts to find a philosophy of vegetal life, a “non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants.” For Marder, to speculate on plant-thinking is to speculate in more general ways about thinking and, ultimately, consciousness. Marder goes through a few philosophical models of consciousness to find instances of plant-thinking. Marder discusses Emmanuel Levinas’ concept of “non-intentional consciousness.” It is a consciousness that never returns to the self. Marder writes: “Instead of pursuing a single target, non-intentional consciousness uncontrollably splits and spills out of itself, tending in various directions at once, but always excessively striving toward the other,” For Levinas, this non-intentional consciousness is the zone of ethics. Marder proposes a reversal of Levinas, “a ‘non-conscious intentionality’ where meanings proliferate without the intervention of conscious representations.” This consciousness is “vitality itself” and a “thinking before thinking.” For Marder, a human remembers what is lighted, and the plant remembers the light itself.

Marder then brings up Henri Bergson. Bergson proposes a human who “thinks with life and not against it.” Marder adds: “The role of our intellect, enunciated in this way, is to ‘secure the perfect fitting of our body to its environment,’ not by indulging in egoistic adaptation at any cost but by creating a unified ensemble of this body and its world.” Thus plant-thinking, like Levinas’ “non-intentional consciousness,” is ethical. It can heal our human propensity to live against our environment. Marder then goes on to discuss Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind. For Bateson, “I” plus the environment in which I live is a “unit of survival.” For Marder, the “it thinks” as opposed to the “I think” is the unit of survival. Marder proposes thinking as nature. Marder writes: “non-oppositional plant-thinking will therefore be entrusted with guarding the sanity of our thought and with maintaining it adjusted to our life-world. A guarantor of environmental justice, the vegetal it thinks will moderate the lethal tendencies of the human I think, neglectful of the non-individuated foundations of thought and of the context integral to its formalization.” Environmental thinking, then, is a post-metaphysical, post-Cartesian “I think.” Our destruction of our environment can be blamed on “I” thinking. I would like to follow Marder’s logic and substitute the word “paints” for “thinks” to come up with “it paints” as a way to describe a side of Inka Essenhigh’s work. Essenhigh is one of those rare artists who brings along an entire microclimate. The opposite of the thinking “I” is not some sort of impulse-driven creativity or loosey-goosey nature worship. It is, in fact, a yearning toward a totality. A vitality. A way of thinking that is, in fact, ethical, because it can be seen as a model of how to think about our environment. She is able to present a Batesonian “unit of survival” pictorially in all its harmony and toxicity. ANIMISM FOR ADULTS: Plant-thinking has animistic qualities. Is the last vestige of our more ancient animist selves relegated to talking cartoon animals? Have we downloaded animism onto children? Have we infantilized animism into oblivion? Has it been tortured out of our souls by the Judeo-Christian hatred of the past that existed before its version of the truth coalesced?

Essenhigh’s living landscapes are a form of animism for adults. They represent an insistence on taking seriously the idea of shared consciousness. This isn’t purely esoteric stuff. This is also ecological thinking. Plant-thinking is dependent on reciprocity. “The ‘it’ that thinks is both more and less than the ‘I.’ More, because it is incapable of thinking by means of a mere ‘I’ divorced from the environmental component of the unit of survival. Less, because this unit is neither as individuated nor as autonomously separate as the subject of thought.” Essenhigh’s paintings, more than those of any other painter I can think of, have a sense of the self tangled in something. Her paintings are not just born of a form of plant-thinking, but they also create in us an access into this sort of thinking in order to experience the paintings. Of course, in art there is the inevitable “I.” But Essenhigh’s paintings can be read as a speculation of how this “it” would represent itself. This is animist in spirit, as opposed to anthropomorphic (in which the human is imposed on the nonhuman). Essenhigh’s paintings are not just plant-like in their nature. They are plant-like in actuality. Their attenuated lines follow twists and turns that seem to know where they are going, like vines. We know that vines have a plan, and the plan has urgency. Essenhigh’s stubborn line pushes through blocks of color and illusionistic elements. It has a vitality with secret rules. It will not be denied. Even when Essenhigh goes for full illusionism and abandons the actual line, we know that it is there, like an invisible border, circumscribing her forms. Anyone who has ever tried to get rid of a vine knows what this vitality of line is. There is also something plant-like in her development as an artist. The more hardedged and contained seed pods of tangled flesh in her earlier enamel paintings have gradually opened up, sprouted, and grown to encompass a single surface. Often, this is what is termed “loosening up,” but in Essenhigh’s case it so mirrors the plant-like vitality of her practice that it has meaning. Essenhigh’s work to date represents a hard-won fluidity of change and flux. Of course, an urban artist’s unit of survival, on a daily basis, is more culture than nature. Essenhigh’s receptivity to the farces of television, the morphology of women’s fashion, and the inky pools of Japanese animation is clear. But, like all highly original work, it is formed of a substance in which references appear and disappear like the faces of seals bobbing and sinking in the ocean.

THOSE ’90s: At the time I loved the artifice of the paint itself. Everything. The color and light looked like it was made from a factory. It seemed to speak to the times: How unnatural the weather was—60 degrees in February! Plastic surgery, the beginning of having cell phones and computers, genetic engineering. Artifice was my way of working through irony. Something that seemed important at the time. —Inka Essenhigh

Painting of the 1990s has yet to be given a story. Here’s one. In 1990, the Museum of Modern Art opened a show called High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture and proved, once and for all, that this bifurcation, along with flatness and the death of painting, were the theoretical equivalent of watching paint dry. Everybody had already assumed that there was no high and low and, in fact, that there never had been. This was tricky for painting, which is the ne plus ultra of high art. But after a relentless theoretical indoctrination in its theoretical death cult, painting had become an act of bad taste. So, in a sense, the bad taste was given for free, and painting entered a wonderful period of idiosyncrasy, with a “we can do whatever we want, nobody’s watching” laced with a “look at me” sense of scale, color, and ambition. Essenhigh, along with Sue Williams, Rita Ackermann, Matthew Ritchie, Cecily Brown, and Hieronymus Bosch (who experienced the 1490s) were all conjuring painterly Batesonian units of survival. Stylistically unrelated to each other, they were linked by the masses of tendrils they contained, their vitality yearning toward the margins. There is a passage in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in which the narrator, still basically a child, is finally allowed to go to the theater. He realizes that the theater is not multiple stages for multiple viewers, but rather a multitude of viewers looking at one stage. The period of personalization of experience, enabled by the Internet, was happening. We were entering the pre-actual-theatrical consciousness of Proust’s narrator’s childish mental landscape. There were no more “isms” to collectively participate in. Essenhigh attained visibility in a period when there was a hunger for the original; the big, crazy idea; the virus in the system; and the catalyst. She represents one of the most fertile and rangy periods in contemporary painting.

This looming mess called the Internet, we were told with breathless excitement by a new tech industry disguised as a benevolent giver of toys and candy, was about to land on us like a planet-sized mass of Silly String. We were going to be able to order pet food without talking to anyone and date without touching anyone. And it was going to be awesome. Certain painters seemed to be painting it as it approached, mashing up classical figuration and illustration, information and abstraction, order and chaos. Postmodernism’s juxtapositions of images became layers of systems. Concerns of the ’60s and ’70s, environmental and humanitarian, were reemerging after being squashed by the Reagan era’s gold-plated steamroller. The awareness of the AIDS crisis, sexism, global warming, and racism brought political consciousness back to art. The body was put into the painting, not always as an image, but as a construct. Concepts like cyberspace and cybersex began to suggest a realm beyond the circumscribed body, a fluidity between it and its environment. The body was no longer an “I.” Rather the body became a social “it.” It was now a field of experience, and it was responsible to an ethical totality. And what was our environment? Where was it? Where did it begin, and where did it end? Our bodies had become biological tricksters, convincing us of an autonomy they did not in fact possess. It was clear that the coalescences around style that postmodernist practices engendered (despite their anti-style ethos) were not going to coalesce in the ’90s—especially not in painting. Every painter was like a Florine Stettheimer dreamer on a daybed in space, piloting through the stars and sunbeams of a world that was no longer available for direct representation. Essenhigh’s morphological dystopia, irreverence toward painterly norms, environmental anxiety, dissection of the female form, and individuality are all qualities that make her emblematic of her generation. TIME IS A SENTIENT OCEAN: In Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris, two scientists inhabit a research station to study the planet Solaris. Solaris has one inhabitant, which is an enormous single-organism ocean. This ocean is sentient and muscular. It spends its time creating enormous structures (symmetriads) and then swallowing them back into itself. The scientists, one already driven mad, are incapable of communicating with or comprehending this oceanic body. But the oceanic body

is inhabiting their minds and sending illusory manifestations of their memories to the research station. For Lem, science’s failure is the “I.” The “I” looks for truth, but only finds mirrors. There was no lack of attempts to come up with an intelligible model of a symmetriad, a visualization of it. One popular explanation was offered by Averian, who presented the matter as follows. Imagine an ancient terrestrial building from Babylonian times. Let it be built out of a living, responsive, evolving substance. Its design proceeds fluidly through a series of phases, taking on, as we watch, the forms of Greek and Roman architecture. Then the columns begin to grow narrow as stalks, the ceiling loses its weight; it rises, sharpens, the arches turn into steep parabolas and eventually fold and soar. The Gothic that has appeared in this way begins to mature and age; it dissolves into late forms, its former precipitous severity replaced with eruptions of orgiastic exuberance. Before our eyes Baroque excess proliferates; and if we continue this sequence—all the time regarding our changing formation as if it were the successive stages of a living being—we’ll finally arrive at the architecture of the space center era, at the same time perhaps getting closer to understanding the nature of the symmetriad. Stanislaw Lem, Solaris In the early work I pictured in my mind everything being made of the same hard, plastic stuff. They were like figurines, the gesture was frozen, the hair would be in one stylized clump, texture simplified or symbolized. Then I would fling them around the room in my mind, but the original narrative of these figures would always be the same. So a figure of a little girl in a wind storm would still be in the same wind storm whatever the position or whoever she was with. I thought about how these figurines would move; things appearing and disappearing as things moved through time and space. If a person was on an exercise machine, only the part of the body being exercised would be there, I thought of the rest as moving around or just not important to the exercise machine, or only the part that was in the same place would show up, and the moving part was left out. —Inka Essenhigh

Lem’s description of form happening in time overlaps with Essenhigh’s. What is an arm that begins at a shoulder but keeps going as the shoulder pivots? It is a rudimentary arc of extension. We know it is an arm because of what it is doing, not what it looks like. Like the scientists gazing at Solaris, we long to imprint our subjectivity with our need to close shapes and make them look more like us. Essenhigh’s line actually seems to bend like the northern lights or a ribbon falling from the sky. It is a line that we feel we are tracing ourselves, as if we were trying to touch something in motion or grasp an object as it, like the ocean of Solaris, rehearses its own morphological history. But Essenhigh’s paintings are never beauty sedatives, even though all the elements are there. They are also warnings. They express ecological and biological anxieties. Ultimately in painting, all striving becomes style in one way or another. And Essenhigh is a master stylist, up there with Aubrey Beardsley, H.R. Giger, and a monk in a freezing scriptorium making arabesques out of his beloved letters. But her paintings aren’t hammered down into the decisive space of illustration. They aren’t finished images. The strongest ones vanish and re-form in new configurations, like plants with their waxing and waning waves of vitality from day to day and season to season. Human beings are constantly creating lines. From the free-form paths of our meanderings to the rigid streamlined paths of our routines, we are constantly wearing linear trenches into the earth. We create figures in space when we talk with our hands, needing to actually draw the experience in space when words can’t be wrapped around nuance and urgency. Our eyes’ manic scanning and searching the faces of others, looking for clues and darting from feature to feature, make insane zigzag spiderwebs. So it makes sense that line is what makes Essenhigh’s alien space-time configurations relatable. We are on solid ground with line, because it tells us where we are going. As often happens in her paintings, her line betrays us, and all of a sudden a leg of sorts loses its leg-ness. But this disruption is no more than a momentary walk in the wrong direction. A walk in which we come across something wonderful that we would never have seen if we were being guided by a more reliable cartographer. n Matthew Weinstein works in painting and sculpture, and for the past fifteen years he has been exploring the narrative and imaginative potential of 3-D computer animation. Weinstein has shown in many national and international institutions and galleries. He is a regular contributor to Artforum and other publications. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Wallpaper for Boys, 1996 Enamel on canvas 54 x 56 inches 137.2 x 142.2 cm

Holly Hobby, 1997 Enamel on canvas 60 x 54 inches 152.4 x 137.2 cm

Deluge, 1998 Enamel on canvas 72 x 72 inches 182.9 x 182.9 cm

The Adoration, 1999 Enamel on canvas 72 x 76 inches 182.9 x 193 cm

Beauty Contest, 1999 Enamel on canvas 77 x 85 inches 195.6 x 215.9 cm

Blue Moon, 1999 Enamel on canvas 72 x 72 inches 182.9 x 182.9 cm

Plastic Surgery and Gym, 1999 Enamel on canvas 78 x 90 inches 198.1 x 228.6 cm

Born Again, 1999-2000 Enamel on canvas 90 x 78 inches 228.6 x 198.1 cm

Reconstruction, 2000 Enamel on canvas 80 x 90 inches 203.2 x 228.6 cm

Bad Men, 2000 Enamel on canvas 48 x 48 inches 121.9 x 121.9 cm

Sunspots, 2000 Enamel on canvas 78 x 72 inches 198.1 x 182.9 cm

Sudden Arrival of Morning, 2001 Enamel on canvas 74 x 72 inches 188 x 182.9 cm

White Rain, 2001 Enamel on canvas 72 x 74 inches 182.9 x 188 cm

Pegasus, 2001 Oil and enamel on canvas 105 x 86 inches 266.7 x 218.4 cm

Arrows of Fear, 2002 Oil on panel 74 x 70 inches 188 x 177.8 cm

Gray Wave, 2002 Oil on panel 70 x 74 inches 177.8 x 188 cm

Green Wave, 2002 Oil on panel 60 x 72 inches 152.4 x 182.9 cm

Optimistic Horse and Rider, 2002 Oil on panel 74 x 70 inches 188 x 177.8 cm

Personal Planet, 2002 Oil on panel 80 x 86 inches 203.2 x 218.4 cm

Power Party, 2003 Oil on canvas 76 x 80 inches 193 x 203.2 cm

Brush with Death, 2004 Oil on canvas 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

In Bed, 2005 Oil on canvas 68 x 62 inches 172.7 x 157.5 cm

Setting Sun, 2005 Oil on canvas 75 1/2 x 70 inches 191.8 x 177.8 cm

Shopping, 2005 Oil on canvas 70 x 76 inches 177.8 x 193 cm

Subway, 2005 Oil on canvas 78 x 70 inches 198.1 x 177.8 cm

Spring, 2006 Oil on canvas 72 x 62 inches 182.9 x 157.5 cm

The Grass at Night in July, 2006 Oil on canvas 42 x 46 inches 106.7 x 116.8 cm

Picnic, 2007 Oil on canvas 74 x 68 inches 188 x 172.7 cm

Snow, 2007 Oil on canvas 62 x 72 inches 157.5 x 182.9 cm

Yellow Fall, 2007 Oil on canvas 68 x 74 inches 172.7 x 188 cm

Fog, Moss, Lichen, 2008 Oil on canvas 64 x 72 inches 162.6 x 182.9 cm

Global Warming Cloud, 2008 Oil on canvas 78 x 60 inches 198.1 x 152.4 cm

Last Snow Before Spring, 2008 Oil on canvas 68 x 74 inches 172.7 x 188 cm

Spring Bar Scene, 2008 Oil on canvas 78 x 72 inches 198.1 x 182.9 cm

Summer Solstice, 2008 Oil on canvas 60 x 78 inches 152.4 x 198.1 cm

The Snow at Night, 2008 Oil on canvas 68 x 74 inches 172.7 x 188 cm

Green Goddess I, 2009 Oil on canvas 60 x 78 inches 152.4 x 198.1 cm

Green Goddess II, 2009 Oil on canvas 60 x 72 inches 152.4 x 182.9 cm

Lower East Side, 2009 Oil on canvas 74 x 70 inches 188 x 177.8 cm

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Minor Sea Gods of Maine, 2009 Oil on canvas 74 x 68 inches 188 x 172.7 cm

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Molly Waiting in a Field, 2009 Oil on canvas 64 x 72 inches 162.6 x 182.9 cm

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Snowflake (Pink), 2009 Oil on canvas 64 x 72 inches 162.6 x 182.9 cm

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Diana, 2010 Oil on canvas 72 1/8 x 64 1/8 inches 183.2 x 162.9 cm

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Moon and Tide, 2010 Oil on canvas 70 x 76 inches 177.8 x 193 cm

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Sea Monster, 2010 Painted monotype printed from a steel matrix 11 3/4 x 13 3/4 inches 29.8 x 34.9 cm

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Living Forest, 2011 Aquatint and line etching with drypoint 22 x 19 3/4 inches 55.9 x 50.2 cm

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Saint in the Snow, 2011 Painted monotype printed from a steel matrix 17 3/4 x 15 3/4 inches 45.1 x 40 cm

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Sea God, 2011 Painted monotype printed from a steel matrix 17 3/4 x 15 3/4 inches 45.1 x 40 cm

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Tree Spirit, 2011 Oil on canvas 36 x 30 inches 91.4 x 76.2 cm

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Daphne and Apollo, 2012 Oil on canvas 60 x 72 inches 152.4 x 182.9 cm

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Late August, 2012 Oil on canvas 72 x 64 inches 182.9 x 162.6 cm

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Little Pearl, 2012 Painted monotype printed from a steel matrix 17 5/8 x 15 1/2 inches 44.8 x 39.4 cm

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The Woodsman, 2012 Oil on canvas 72 x 68 inches 182.9 x 172.7 cm

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Volcano, 2012 Painted monotype printed from a steel matrix 17 5/8 x 15 1/2 inches 44.8 x 39.4 cm

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Summer Landscape, 2013 Oil on paper 84 x 51 1/2 inches, each panel 213.4 x 130.8 cm

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Aquarius, 2014 Oil on paper 84 x 52 inches, each panel 213.4 x 132.1 cm

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City Blossom, 2014 Oil on paper 96 x 51 inches, each panel 243.8 x 129.5 cm

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Sea Spots, 2014 Oil on paper 51 1/4 x 40 inches 130.2 x 101.6 cm

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Star Maker, 2014 Oil on paper 51 1/4 x 40 inches 130.2 x 101.6 cm

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Dance Party, 2015 Watercolor on paper 38 x 43 inches 96.5 x 109.2 cm

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First Signs of Spring, 2015 Oil on canvas 46 x 50 inches 116.8 x 127 cm

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Moon Creatures, 2015 Oil on canvas 62 x 72 inches 157.5 x 182.9 cm

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Stars and Flowers or The Nursery, 2015 Oil on canvas 62 x 52 inches 157.5 x 132.1 cm

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Yellow Drawing, 2015 Oil on paper 51 x 40 inches 129.5 x 101.6 cm

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Earth and Sea, 2016 Enamel on panel 55 x 60 inches 139.7 x 152.4 cm

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Fairy Procession, 2016 Oil and enamel on wood 78 x 80 inches 198.1 x 203.2 cm

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Forgotten Cemetery, 2016 Enamel on panel 24 x 24 inches 61 x 61 cm

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Monsters of Manhattan, 2016 Oil and enamel on panel 60 x 55 inches 152.4 x 139.7 cm

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New Condos, 2016 Enamel on panel 60 x 65 inches 152.4 x 165.1 cm

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Political Cartoon Painting, 2016 Enamel on panel 60 x 60 inches 152.4 x 152.4 cm

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Power Plant, 2016 Enamel on panel 39 3/4 x 39 3/4 inches 101 x 101 cm

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Seaside Cemetery, 2016 Enamel on panel 60 x 60 inches 152.4 x 152.4 cm

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Sitting Spruce, 2016 Enamel on panel 48 x 48 inches 121.9 x 121.9 cm

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Spruce, 2016 Enamel on panel 60 x 60 inches 152.4 x 152.4 cm

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Fog Spruce with Orange Fungus, 2017 Enamel on panel 48 x 48 inches 121.9 x 121.9 cm

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Treasure Hunt, 2017 Enamel on canvas 60 x 58 inches 152.4 x 147.3 cm

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Girls Night Out, 2017 Enamel on canvas 60 x 58 inches 152.4 x 147.3 cm

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Party of the Flames and Flowers, 2017 Enamel on canvas 48 x 55 inches 121.9 x 139.7 cm

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Birdsongs, 2017 Enamel on canvas 42 x 40 inches 106.7 x 101.6 cm

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Forrest Tableau, 2017 Enamel on canvas 32 x 80 inches 81.3 x 203.2 cm

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Midsummer Nightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dream, 2017 Enamel on canvas 32 x 80 inches 81.3 x 203.2 cm

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Arbor Ignudi #1, 2017 Enamel on panel 84 x 27 inches 213.4 x 68.6 cm

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Arbor Ignudi #2, 2017 Enamel on panel 84 x 27 inches 213.4 x 68.6 cm

RYAN McGINNESS INTERVIEWS INKA ESSENHIGH October 6 and 7, 2017, Inka Essenhigh’s studio, Lower East Side, Manhattan

BACKGROUND Ryan: We’ve known each other for 15 years, and, for the record, let me start by saying I’ve been a fan and an admirer of your work since before I knew you—since before we were friends. I saw your work first at Deitch Projects in 1999. I went into that show and had my socks blown off, and that only happens once every few years. Granted, I don’t go to a lot of exhibitions, but it was one of the rare times that I felt like, OK, this is something new. And I saw an affinity with what I was trying to do with my work and my sensibility, and it got my juices flowing. So, I’ve known about your work for a long time, and I’ve been a big fan. I was super excited to take this opportunity and use it as an excuse to really research you and your work and all the changes you’ve made over the years. Let’s start with my first question: You were born in 1969 in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Why? Inka: Why? Because my dad was teaching at Penn State. He was a professor of mechanical engineering, and he’s English. He came to the United States as part of the English brain drain and settled at Penn State, and then later we moved to Ohio State. Ryan: Got it. And he met your mom in Pennsylvania? Inka: No. He met my mom skiing on a vacation near Montreal. She’s Ukrainian and emigrated to Canada after World War II. Ryan: You attended Columbus College of Art and Design for a BFA and the School of the Visual Arts here in New York for an MFA. What were your undergraduate and graduate experiences like, and how did they form the foundation for your work now, if at all?

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Inka: CCAD was considered a traditional Bauhaus design-style school, and it emphasized a lot of drawing. I knew that by staying in Ohio there was going to be something regional about my schooling. I already knew, in 1988, that painting was dead. I could see in Flash Art magazine that painting was dead, but I loved painting and I liked the German painters. It’s embarrassing, but I was just too scared to move to New York City. It seemed too much at 17, too mind blowing. I think of Columbus, Ohio, and that whole part of the world as having a relationship to comic books, to narrative, to fantasy, to psychedelic culture, to … Ryan: All of that is in the air. Inka: Right! It’s in the air. Ryan: Additionally, you went through a program that had an emphasis on the core basics. Inka: They also had a really huge illustration department in the school, so the teachers were all very nervous about what was fine art and what was illustration. It really made me nervous, especially since I had an animated way of drawing reminiscent of Walt Disney. Just for context: Charles Burchfield was considered “too Disney.” I hated myself for that, but I didn’t know how to make myself stop! Ryan: Or furthermore, you didn’t know you should not have stopped yourself? Inka: Exactly. If I were really sophisticated, I would have just kept going. Ryan: And then you went on to SVA for your Masters, and obviously you stayed here in New York. Which leads me to my next question. Upon graduation, what was your life like trying to survive in New York while making your work? Inka: You know, probably a lot easier than it is these days. I mean it was bad, but it was hopeful. I could tell you my jobs. I had lots of different jobs. My first job was at Mode Works, where I did murals. I did gold-leafing for Victoria’s Secret. We did all the gold-leafing onsite in malls all over America. I remember doing blueprint murals for Structure stores, and I painted red curtains for Limited Express. Ryan: I was struck by the fact that you designed fabric for Sears boxer shorts and how that informed your wallpaper painting. Can you tell me a bit about that?

Inka: That was a job that I fell into. Today it’s something one goes to school for. They had just come out with a program for fabric design on the computer. I was the girl that was making boards of fabric samples for salesmen to go out to fabric licensing companies and they were like, “OK, you over there in the corner! Get your ass over here and learn this computer program!” [Laughing] My boss was named Bunny Bizell, and she has a soft spot for artists. She was this old lady who had this gravelly voice—you know [Inka as Bunny], “You gotta get in here and make some money, so you can go home and do your art!” Ryan: So, you did that! Inka: And I did that. I did do some space shorts for boys, and I wish I still had samples of them. Very few things I designed got made. One time, I did recognize a check pattern that Richard Tuttle was wearing. Ryan: Well, those early paintings that were informed by those boxer short designs got, in your words, “rid of ‘painterly-ness.’” What exactly did you mean, and how do you feel about returning to painterly-ness years later? Inka: Well, when you make something more graphic, all of a sudden your painting is talking to graphic design, and you lose a lot of the weight of art history. Ryan: But then you eventually abandoned that aesthetic. Or transitioned into something that is a little looser. Inka: I did want to make something painterly, but I also wanted … I have so many different things that I want my paintings to be about. And I’m so convinced that that’s not the way to make a painting. Ryan: That what’s not the way to make a painting? Inka: I have a long list—a checklist of that which I wish my paintings could encompass. However, I don’t think that is a good way to set about making a painting. You can’t go down your checklist and try to find a way to combine all these things. Ryan: That’s a very contrived approach. Inka: It’s a very contrived approach; and, really, you should be just looking for that one thing that you’re excited about.

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Ryan: It opens up a question, though: What’s on that list? Inka: Right. What’s on that list? Well, it changes from day to day. Unfortunately, it changes so much. For example, some days I want my painting to have simple, flat shapes, some days I want the space to be three-dimensional. Some days I want it to be talking to an exclusive in-the-know art world, other days I want it to be talking to everyone. The two are not mutually exclusive, but you can emphasize parts of your work to talk to different people. Ryan: I think it’s very brave of you to embrace that shape-shifting attitude from day to day instead of locking it down. I can only imagine that it is very frustrating. Inka: It makes my paintings take longer to complete. CAREER

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Ryan: To what degree does working and living in Manhattan impact your work? Inka: I really think that what we’re doing here and why we deal with this …. Ryan: Why we put up with this… Inka: ’Cause it’s not that fun! Ryan: It’s not fun. It’s a struggle. We do it because it’s hard, not easy. I think the reward is the idea density. We’re here because this is the thickest pool of concepts and ideas floating around that we can swim in. Inka: Exactly! You can be a part of, and influence the Zeitgeist. And that’s what I’m hoping for! We understand artists’ work through other artists, and how they influenced each other. I’m looking to be inspired by new ideas. As we get older, it happens less and less. Ryan: It’s difficult! And that leads me to my next question: You also have a studio in Maine. You go every summer. How is that experience different? And what effect does it have on your work? Inka: Well, I think that by the time I made the studio in Maine, I had already changed my main focus. I think that there was a time when—you know, you said that you had looked at my art in 1999—I sat down and said, “What is my intention for my work? I want to make something that looks like today.” And that was my number one intention.

Ryan: Which is a flawed approach to making work. Inka: It is. I think that it became too difficult, too narrow a path to walk. Then it’s not really about anything. It’s about not being this, or not being that. Ryan: Well furthermore, it’s not about you! Inka: There isn’t a purity test, but it was more about pursuing something that I thought was an aesthetic of the times. And I really do think I got there, but it’s hard to maintain, and I didn’t want to make that work that way anymore. I thought that I had done it—great! Then the Iraq war began and Steve (my husband) was in Iraq (making art) and I felt like I wanted to unplug from the world, the TV and culture. So I unplugged myself. To a certain degree, I feel like I’m continuing to live in an unplugged way, and I’m making work that sort of requires me to be somewhat unplugged. Ryan: So being in Maine helped that process where you could bring that feeling or attitude of being unplugged back into your painting? Inka: I began to think about what it means to be opposite of culture and to be a human being. I started to try to paint about what was unseen to find the life within things and animate them. Ryan: You’ve mentioned to me the “art world” and your problems with them. Who exactly are these people and what resistance have you received? And furthermore, why care? Inka: When I say the “art world,” I’m talking about my artist friends who live here, critics, high-end collectors, and curators who inform what we see in major museums. Instead of saying “art world,” I could say “fitting in with the times.” Ryan: I’ve always believed that acceptable work is not acceptable. [Inka laughs] So are you trying to have it both ways? Do you really only want to be part of a club that won’t have you as a member? Inka: I hoped I would be talented enough to break some rules. I mean John Currin was good enough to break the illustration rule. I hoped that I was strong enough as a painter to break some of the good taste rules as well. Time will tell.

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Ryan: Assuming there is such a thing as an Inka Essenhigh brand, do you feel obliged to manage it? Inka: That’s a good question. You’re talking about being misunderstood at some level. I mean, if something were to be off-brand … Ryan: Well, to what degree do you care about or even manage your image as an artist and the work you make? I mean, because you can make off-brand work. Maybe you are inclined. Maybe you aren’t. We’ve both seen how some artists go so far as to assume a consistent costume in order to build recognition or build their brand. Just how corny is that? Inka: One thing that I think I have going in my favor is that I have a very distinctive line or a very distinctive way of making shapes. I have a style. I’m a stylist. It comes so naturally to me. It’s always there; therefore, I can play with my brand. Other people are not stylists. I think they have to worry more about being recognized. Ryan: Making work to learn from versus making work to earn from. Let’s talk about this. Inka: [Laughing] Right. Ryan: And of course, I’m talking about the difference between making work that stimulates you and you’re constantly learning from it—you’re trying new things for which there might not be a market. You certainly know what a marketable painting is or even what size might be most sellable—which you can easily make. Inka: You know, Ryan, I actually just started doing that. Ryan: OK, in terms of what? Format? Imagery? Inka: Making something that I think will be understood. Ryan: Is that in terms of form or content? Inka: Taste. I am very aware of the fact that there are certain things that I am drawn to where I feel like I am being kind of edgy. I did a painting once called Molly in a Field. Which is a black horse in a field, and the horse’s actual name is Molly. And it’s a pretty sunset painting with a horsey in a field, and I feel like I’m being aggressively edgy by being so openhearted. I think that this is actually beautiful. Ryan: Is that an example of a work to sell?

Inka: No. No, that was an example of something that I just had to do. I did whatever I wanted up until a couple of years ago. I’d say, in part, the return to enamel was to go back to what would make my work more modernist. Can I make the same thing, but can I make it so people can hear me? And so, I think that going back to enamel was a way to do that. I had a lot of success when I was relatively young. And I thought my job was to endlessly plow through new material and not ever give a shit. Ryan: And not accommodate the market. Inka: Never! But I want it to communicate. SHARING SIMULATIONS Ryan: We all know that seeing a painting in person is different than seeing a painting in reproduction. But for your work specifically, what are those differences? I can see already, looking around your studio, that metallic and enamel have a paint quality that you really need to see in person. Inka: Yeah, you can’t see how dense it is in reproduction. Ryan: It’s just juicy. And scale, obviously … Inka: Paintings can do something to you—when you’re standing in front of them in person. We can say that you feel differently on a mountain than you do at the beach, and it’s not good, bad, or indifferent. It’s the experience. You can plug your nose and ears and still feel that you are at the beach. What is it? Ionization? And I think color and light do something to a person. Ryan: Right, physiologically. Inka: Even if you were blind and couldn’t see a stained-glass window, it would probably have some kind of effect on you, even if you couldn’t put it into words what that was. Paintings do the same thing. They have consciousness in them, and they resonate that. Paintings are always talking to you on so many different levels. And they can’t really talk to you on a small screen.

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Ryan: You’ve chosen Instagram to be your primary publisher for online content. Why? Inka: Because it’s easy; it’s less words. Ryan: It’s image-driven. Inka: Yeah, it’s image-driven. It’s not opinion-driven. Facebook is opinion-driven. It’s for writers to state their opinions. Ryan: Your first post was on October 21, 2013. It’s a view of your studio—it’s Inka’s world. Or, Inka’s worlds within her world. So your paintings within your studio. Inka: Right. It’s a theme you like, a frame in a frame. Ryan: Absolutely. It’s a studio view. It’s also a kind of self-portrait, kind of a behind-thescenes; you’re pulling back the curtain. What is your overall strategy—if even you have one, or maybe it’s changed—with your publishing program? Inka: For Instagram, specifically? I think I’ve always worked the natural, this-is-actually-howthings-are angle. And I don’t think that always works out. I think that I prefer to have paintings that are not quite done so that you don’t have the feeling of having seen it when you go to see the real thing. Ryan: Show the in-progress [on Instagram] and then the reveal at the exhibition? Inka: I think those that are really interested will go and see it in person. Ryan: What other social media platforms do you allow to publish your work? Inka: I am totally happy for my work to go out into the real world. As a matter of fact, on my website I have put two high-resolution files up for free. I would put up more, but I don’t want to freak out my dealers. Ryan: The idea is that anyone could download it and use it, materialize it, or use it as a screen desktop of whatever? Inka: Yeah. Whatever they want. I want my work to go out there. Ryan: In simulation mode? Because you’re not a photographer, and you’re not a digital artist; it’s not your primary medium. So you’ve got the painting, and no one can really have the painting, or only a few people have the paintings. Is that what makes you feel more comfortable with sharing reproductions?

Inka: Well, possibly. But I also think that people will understand your work and the work will find a place. I’m interested in finding out where the work goes. Where does it get used? Does it get used to sell bath towels? Would somebody turn it into a mug or a tie? Ryan: I think commercial applications are something else, but maybe in terms of education, like teachers could download it? Inka: When you see a painting again and again, I think that it builds up meaning. Something is lost when seeing the Mona Lisa because we can no longer experience the painting, we can only recognize it. Now the experience is of the adoration and value of the work of art. Ryan: Through reproduction. Inka: Because of reproduction. I think that buildup is real. I think that a platform out there in the world can start to build on itself, and that’s how things take on value and meaning. It’s not like a painting pops out of thin air and is deemed a masterpiece; it actually needs all those eyeballs on it, either digitally or in person, for it to take on meaning in people’s minds. Ryan: Right. Premised on reproduction. People aren’t confused at what they are looking at. They need to know that this is the real thing. That’s confusing with photography or digital art. Inka: Is that what you mean with your work? Ryan: I make paintings. I’m happy to have reproductions of the paintings go anywhere and everywhere. Rarely, will I make digital … Inka: Well, don’t you remember you did those things on Instagram? Ryan: Oh, right. Yes. Exactly! In fact, that brings us back to this whole Instagram problem. Because when Instagram first came out, everyone said, “Oh, you should be on Instagram.” And I waited and hemmed and hawed about it for a while. How am I going to address Instagram? I got really obsessed with making work that was specific to the digital medium. So, you are absolutely right. Those buttons that I was making for three years—black-and-white typographically driven phrases were made only for Instagram.

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They didn’t exist anywhere else. Although I may materialize them and print them out and make buttons later. But that was my approach: Here’s a new medium. I’m not going to conform to what everyone else is doing. It’s not premised on reproduction. I’m making site-specific work, and I have a plan. It’s a three-year-long plan. It’s over a thousand buttons. There’ll be a big reveal. But, what I learned after this huge project is that no one gives a shit. Nobody cares. Nobody gets so caught up with the difference between reproduction and production and simulation and what’s real and what’s made site-specifically. Nobody has the same hang-ups I have. And then after that project, I just kind of relaxed about the whole thing and took, like you were describing, a more and more organic approach. LOGISTICS 198

Ryan: New topic: format. Your canvases almost always are or were squares, but more often they’re just slightly off, why? Inka: They can be much more decorative that way. So that it plays between being figurative and abstract. Ryan: Do you create bodies of work or organize your output into groups or bodies or periods? Inka: Yeah, I do. Well, there’s the early enamel, transition into oil, and there’s the ones that were done on panels, and then there was the oil on canvas … so it is medium-oriented. Ryan: And what about subjects? Inka: It seems like I can’t really control what I paint. I wish I could control it. I just always go for what I think would be really awesome to paint. [Laughter] Ryan: I believe that the best paintings are the results of the process of making the paintings having informed painting. I called this “process integrity.” Another way to make a painting is to form a plan from which the painting is made—exactly adhering to the preconceived plan. Where do you fall on that spectrum between planned paintings and production-informed paintings?

Inka: It’s all production. Even if I do have a brief tiny little sketch, I will go and look for … the technique is to go into meditation and try to conjure up an experience. It could be a quality of light or the morning. Let’s just say it’s birds in the morning, the sound of them, how that feels. And so I close my eyes, and I will see a lavender color. The color becomes my point of reference. I might do a sketch or just write a word like “lavender” or “birds”—something to remind me of my “idea.” What’s in my mind is the sketch. But I don’t actually have it. Ryan: So, you’ve already answered my next question, which is, “What is your process for making a painting, and do you make preliminary sketches or flesh out different options?” And it sounds like you create an experience for yourself and you want to recreate it or you want the painting to reflect that. Inka: I do. It didn’t used to be that way. It used to be that I was an abstract painter reacting to whatever happened. It was like when you free associate—drawing where you just start drawing and whatever happens, happens. So the meaning would be random, and sometimes my painting was ugly and sometimes I wouldn’t like it, and I would say to myself, “Oh it’s ugly, and I don’t like it, but that’s the world I live in.” Later, I figured out that artists create the world, and perhaps I could make something I liked. Ryan: You shifted from enamel painting to oil in 2001. And now, of course, we talked about you shifting back again. Was this purely because of what oil and enamel could do? To what end? Inka: Well, I think that the first thing that enamel can do is that it can make the work contemporary. It’s just much more graphic, and it just has that punch to it when you see it in person. It removes all the art history; it wipes the slate clean. Oil is sticky, it’s heavy, and I think that people don’t like the feeling of a lot of work. That’s not really true. People love work, as long as it feels like it’s delightful. The detail in my oil paintings looked labored, the same work in enamel looked easy. Ryan: What you’re talking about is addressing an audience. Inka: I am talking about my idea of an audience, so I might be talking to myself about myself.

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AESTHETICS

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Ryan: Let’s assume that there is a spectrum between a cartoon aesthetic of universal or cliché forms and one that is more representational, depicting specific realities. Where are your images on that spectrum? Inka: Well, right in the middle. [Laugher] Ryan: OK, related: Flat blocks of color versus simulations of forms? Your journey from one end of the spectrum to the other shares a little story … Inka: And back again. Ryan: And back again. Briefly, tell me about that thought process. Inka: Well, I think what we need in this day and age is hit-you-over-the-head experiences like stained glass. If you’re not affected by a stained-glass window, boy are you dead! I think that there is something about flat blocks of color that it just does something to you. It’s just easier to read, and it’s more modern, and maybe we just need that—I don’t know. Ryan: OK, yeah. This spectrum that I described, is it the same range as between abstraction and figurative? Inka: They’re related. I wouldn’t say abstract and figurative, I’d say narrative. I don’t necessarily want to make abstract paintings nor figurative paintings as much as I want to make narrative paintings, and they can be either. Ryan: This is particularly interesting to me, because I’ve been going through a period for about three or four years where I am coming to terms with narrative. And now, I want to make narrative paintings. Inka: I think it’s kind of central to my work and central to our group of friends. We’re all making narrative work. I think the thing about narrative is that it’s how we, in our culture, change consciousness. We tell stories. If you want to change people’s hearts and minds about themselves or the world they live in, you tell ’em a story. If you want people to feel compassion, you tell ’em a story.

Ryan: Illustration—what is illustration? Is there an illustration vs. art divide? Is the point of illustration to illustrate a point clearly, to communicate clearly? Is it the artist’s role to communicate clearly, or only to poetically hint or allude? What I’m getting at with this is the role of the artist and the role of the aesthetic between illustration and art. Inka: OK, there’s a lot of difference. I think what pictures and good illustration do is give an experience that is “elsewhere.” It’s not really in the painting but in a space your mind creates. The intention of modern/non-illusional/flat/abstract art is to give you an experience of the thing itself, as it stands in front of you, no need to make it up. I want my work to do both. I love objects, and I also love the space in my mind that is created with pictures. One is not more real and therefore better then the other. With bad illustration, it’s a half experience; once the work hits a certain amount of explanation, it’s done. Abstract art can have the same problem; it can be a shorthand of an experience that relies on the viewer already knowing and loving other abstract art. Ryan: Right. And in fact, some of my favorite abstract art is art in illustration that portrays abstract art—like a New Yorker cartoon about abstract art. Inka: Right, yeah! Ryan: It’s symbolic abstract art. So art as a symbol for art. Inka: So it becomes a symbol and not the experience itself. Like a symbol, it’s a gateway to an experience. Ryan: What is the aesthetic influence of Disney animation upon your work, and do your paintings subvert that aesthetic? Inka: I knew even from a very young age that I was not supposed to like Disney. I already knew the difference between that and going to a museum and seeing a Van Gogh. That was high art, and Disney was low art. The thing that I found interesting as an adult, returning to a lot of the Disney stuff, is that I think that they really do have, at moments, something magical about them. Ryan: They’re masters of narration. Inka: Stories about how we’ve been sitting on the pot of gold all along.

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Ryan: This is from ARTnews: “Despite hovering on the brink of being cloying or cartoon-like, the new works maintain their artistic edge while offering just the right dose of magic.” Inka: [Laughs] Ryan: This reminds me that the best aspect of art is that there are no rules, and the best art reminds us of that fact that by tricking us into thinking that the work has broken a rule of art. What is that “artistic edge”? And the flip side is, are cartoons too blunt? The point that ARTnews was making about your work is that it’s just on the brink of being cartoon-like. Which sounds like it ... Inka: … risks bad taste and being generic. Ryan: It runs the risk of being bad, and not artistic and offers up just the right dose of that magic, like you were saying, and it maintains an artistic edge. So, this is an art-trade magazine throwing out some terms. What do these terms mean? What do they mean by “artistic edge”? Inka: There is such a thing. We came of age, you and I, during a time when if we wanted to make a painting of a beautiful sunset then we had to deal with irony. It’s probably a little poison that’s still in us. Ryan: It’s almost inevitable. Inka: It’s still necessary. Ryan: What is the underlying visual logic that informs your paintings? Basically, what are your rules for your pictures? For example, must you adhere to the laws of physics? Inka: I think of each painting as being a dance. So each thing has to have a certain balance and a counterbalance. Ryan: Compositionally? Inka: Yes. You feel it just like a flow; it’s like a paisley flow pattern. Ryan: So some of your rules for composition? Inka: So this responds to that in a very two-dimensional way. Ryan: Do you ever break or undermine those rules?

Inka: Yes, when I made work that was more about the viewer entering a world, entering a picture. Then I broke those rules. Sometimes I’m happiest as a decorator, sometimes as a maker of places. Ryan: What are some of your signature dance moves in painting? For example, a brush stroke, or the way you render eyes or ... Inka: I think that it’s just the arabesque line. Ryan: I do not believe craft is how well work is made or how well materials or tools are being used; rather, craft is how unique unto the creator the results are. For example, could only that person have crafted that work? What is the evidence of your craft in your work? Inka: I think that you can see it more readily in the enamel paintings. Ryan: How you handle enamel? Inka: Yes, how I handle enamel. Ryan: In combination with, again, your line. Inka: Right, exactly. I think it just naturally picks that up. Ryan: With the emergence of environmental elements in your scenes from 2006–17, the value given to the figures and the environment shifts sometimes is equalized. A sense of place is increasingly specific. So, the question is: Why? And I think I already know the answer because of the ... Inka: Narrative. So, place is consciousness. Ryan: Especially in your early paintings, I rarely see cropped images that bleed off the edges. Your borders are controlled and contained. Cropping elements implies that the painting is a window unto a larger world, and we are seeing only a section of that world. Whereas paintings with no cropped images implies that we are looking at the entire, whole world. Are your paintings now from the same world, or is each still a unique different world? Inka: I actually think that they’re from the same world. As a matter of fact, I think that the early enamel paintings were the same world as well. It’s just that you couldn’t see it. Ryan: Sure, OK. This is more of a metaphysical question. Where is the rest of the picture?

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Inka: In a different time. Ryan: Where are you going from here? Is there a plan, or are you along for the ride? Inka: I’m along for the ride. MEANING

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Ryan: What do your paintings mean? Inka: Well, they don’t really mean anything anymore than being at the beach means anything. I want them to be experiences. Like now, I’m at the beach. Now I’m on a mountain. So it’s place and time and, hopefully, something specific enough. Ryan: In ARTnews, you were quoted as saying, “Subject matter has always been such a crisis.” Does subject matter equal meaning? Inka: No. It doesn’t, but it does. I think it doesn’t matter, because people “like the way things look” more then what’s being said. I think what an artist can do is take any subject and put it into a bubble of calm—a stopping of time, isolation, or a space to examine something. Once you have that feeling of being able to examine something—anything—that is the meaning. Ryan: Well, you’re meditating … Inka: I’m trying to see the world in its unseen way. I suppose that if there’s any belief system, it’s that things are completely alive—all things radiate. I believe that everything is interconnected. It’s not a belief; it’s an experience. Ryan: What is the role of art, the purpose of art? Is the purpose to raise questions instead of provide answers, even if those questions have only to do with the nature of art itself? Inka: I think that it just changes from moment to moment. I think we’re here for beauty. Ryan: OK, I think that’s a great answer. Upon whom is the burden of communication in art, the sender or the receiver? What is the artist’s responsibility in regards to meaning? Is there anything wrong with unintended meaning? Inka: Oh, absolutely not. I want these to have as much meaning as possible. Although, I

would be bummed out if I were to come back in 200 years and find my work associated with some mentality that I wasn’t into. Ryan: Addressing the gap between intentions and interpretation, it’s in this gap where I believe the magic of art exists. It is what separates art from design or illustration or other forms of visual communication. To what degree do you care about the viewers’ interpretation? Inka: I do care. I’d love to say I didn’t, but I do. And to give you something specific, Green Goddess II was in fact altered because somebody said, “Oh, it looks like she’s on her cell phone.” And I just hated that. It just drove me up the wall. So, I went back in, and I altered it. Ryan: That’s a great example. Imagination, fantasy, and fiction versus reality, truth, and fact. Is fiction a vehicle for the truth, or is this even a false dichotomy—fact versus fiction? Inka: I can’t help but think of my relationship with my husband, Steve. So I sit here in my studio. I meditate. He goes out into the real world, and he deals with facts—real people and war. I would say that my work is just as important to the real world as anything else. Because, in fact, it informs the real world. Have you ever sat down and tried to imagine what peace might actually be like? And if nobody’s going to imagine peace, then it’ll never happen. Ryan: Should art tell the truth or be the truth? Inka: Be the truth. We have the amazing capability of creating the truth. Ryan: Since meaning is constructed in the viewer’s mind, perhaps the best we can do in our pursuit of making meaningful paintings is to construct pictures that allow for people to find meaning—to provide puzzle pieces for a variety of meanings that can be interpreted any number of ways—work that allows for the attribution of meaning. Do we strictly adhere to our internal vision regardless of how the paintings are received by others? Inka: I grew up believing we were supposed to be 100 percent faithful to our internal vision. Ryan: What is the meaning of meaning? Meaning comforts and gives structure to what appears to be chaos. And meaning can inspire purpose. Understanding, even if an illusion,

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is an easing of the pains of existence, which is meaningless. If one can find meaning in art, then is the purpose of art to ease the pain of a meaningless life? Inka: Right. OK, I will say this. I think that beauty is meaning enough for me. We live in an art world where beauty can come in a lot of different forms. I like pretty stuff, too. I do think if you are making the world a more beautiful place then you are helping the world. Ryan: Right. If multiple meanings are simultaneously possible within a work of art, and you’ve given us examples of how your paintings have been interpreted in a number of different ways, and none of those meanings are realized until one of the meanings is concluded in a viewer’s mind, then I think that the true power of art is to create a personal reality relative to each individual viewer. Art transcends reality in a way that does not conform to the rules of this observable universe. Can we think of paintings as dimension machines that can birth any number of possible realities? Inka: Yes. That’s wonderful. I love that. It’s like it just keeps throwing up. Ryan: Is art appreciation a quantum experience? Does this mean that the viewer completes the art, as Marcel Duchamp claimed? So we can’t have art without an audience? Inka: I believe that art is a porthole. Thoughts and experiences go in, and thoughts and experiences come out. Ryan: Man versus nature. To paint a thing is to conquer the thing—to own it. What’s your relationship to nature? Inka: I’m on the outside, but I use my work to get inside. Ryan: Similarly, to paint your own thoughts is to understand them and know thyself. I think the best artists know themselves, and their work is residue from the process of understanding who they are. Everything everyone makes is autobiographical. Where are you in your work? Inka: I think as I get older … the words that come to mind are self-acceptance. Ryan: Do you make psychological paintings? Is your work just the residue from the process of accepting yourself? Inka: I think that it’s probably both. The more you accept who you are, the more you can also not be you.

Ryan: And in becoming more individualized, we become more universal. We become more the same. Inka: Yes. Ryan: Ultimately, the goal is to be more you and find whatever your truth is and have faith that it will resonate because it will ultimately be universal. Inka: I believe that 100 percent. I feel like there’s one catch to that, and that is that you can control everything about it but the timing. Ryan: Oh, OK! So when we’re talking about universal and the idea of work resonating, it’s contextual to the times. Inka: Well, it can be. I would like to think that some of the works I’ve done that have not been popular, that have not been well received—that maybe they will be in the future! I hope so. I put my heart into them. Ryan: Is Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère referenced in your painting Spring Bar Scene? Inka: Yes. Ryan: As far as I can tell, this is a rare example of an art history reference. Are there others? Inka: I love art history. I love pictures. I love paintings. It’s true, I don’t have a lot of time to go look at a lot of shows. They’ve got to be special shows. There are paintings that chat at me while I’m making certain paintings. So I could be talking to certain paintings. For example, perhaps you will see that this is, in fact, a Toulouse-Lautrec (Inka walks over to a painting). Ryan: OK, yes. Inka: One of the Moulin Rouge paintings. There’s the girl dancing with her leg in the air. There are two women who have entered the Moulin Rouge—she’s in pink, and her friend is in pink and green. This is my version of it. It was much more straightup like that, but yesterday it needed something right there to make it move better. Toulouse-Lautrec is in the picture mode—you know a space you walk into—and these days I want to make it more decorative. Space and narrative is to serve the pattern.

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The second I put the space you walk into first, it seems to have this effect where the weight of art history comes roaring in, despite my efforts to alleviate that with the enamel. Anyway, this is the party of the flame and the flower. They are dancing together. This flower is handing out cups of water. Here we have those little red cups with the white … Ryan: I see Solo cups. Inka: Yeah, exactly, and some flames. I don’t know, maybe there’s gasoline in the cups. Ryan: It’s wonderfully otherworldly. TOURISTS VS. PRESERVATIONISTS

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Ryan: Having grown up in Virginia Beach, I find myself using the tourist analogy to help me clearly see who’s who professionally in the art world. So there are tourists, and there are preservationists. Tourists come seasonally, only when conditions are comfortable, and they exploit the natural resources. There is a tourist industry that takes advantage of the visitors and extracts money from them. Preservationists support the conservation of the natural resources and artifacts with an eye toward long-term sustainability. Somewhere in between is responsible tourism. Anyway, do you like going to the beach? Inka: I do like going to the beach. We are part of the “summer people” up in Maine. Ryan: So you’re a tourist up there! Is that what they are called—you are called? Inka: That’s what we’re called. I don’t know if this is interesting. Ryan: Well, it relates to tourism, and Virginia Beach is all about tourism. Inka: It doesn’t exist without it? Ryan: Well, the military and tourism. Tourism was a big part of my growing up, kindergarten through twelfth grade in Virginia Beach, and, actually, some of my summer jobs had to do with catering to the tourists who came in the summer. There were tourist beaches and locals-only beaches. My father had a T-shirt I remember that said, “I’m not a tourist,

I live here.” So, that kind of assertion of native pride is something that always stuck with me. There was always this kind of low-grade tension between locals and tourists. Do you feel that in Maine? Inka: Oh, totally. They know exactly who we are. We will never be a part of the community. We are from away. Ryan: And of course, we’re talking about this as an analogy in the art world. I prefer to work with preservationists. Inka: But those are a dying breed. Ryan: ARTnews wrote, “Dealers came calling on Essenhigh, along with the press and collectors such as…” How did you, and how do you, deal with these tourists? With suspicion, open arms, celebration, a combination, or by closing your door? Inka: Back then I was thrilled, and I opened the door to every person. And I felt like so much of my energy got sucked out of me. I would never do that again. Now, if it were to happen again, I am much more able to say no. I guess I have such an accommodating personality. I still am so thankful that I get to make paintings every day. And anybody could ask anything of me, and my first instinct is to say yes. Ryan: Me, too. Inka: I have to really nail myself down and say, “Wait a minute what’s going on?” Ryan: I keep a Post-it on my desk that says, “Say no.” Just to remind myself, because, like you, I think in the past I just said, “Yes, yes, yes; come in, come in, come in,” and I had been taken so advantage of that it left me bitter and critical of anyone who asked for anything. I’m still suspicious of people who buy numerous paintings of mine. You have to think of your work as shares in your company, and if someone starts buying up too many shares … Inka: Honestly, I believe my paintings will eventually find the place that they need to go. I have this feeling that the paintings themselves kind of vibed out a certain “Time for us to go. Let’s ditch this dude.” It’s a parting of the ways. But they do find their rightful spot somewhere, eventually.

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STANDARD STUPID INTERVIEW QUESTIONS MOST PEOPLE ASK ARTISTS

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Ryan: I want to end with a rapid fire of standard stupid interview questions most people ask artists. What’s your favorite color? Inka: Teal. Ryan: If you were not an artist, what would you do? Inka: No idea. Ryan: Did you always know you wanted to be an artist? Inka: Yes. Ryan: What’s your favorite work of art? Inka: I’d probably go with Botticelli’s Spring Time. Ryan: Is your husband also an artist? Inka: Yes. Ryan: What inspires you? Inka: These days, the search for beauty. Ryan: Did you study art in school? Inka: Yes. Ryan: Who’s your favorite artist? Inka: Too many to answer. Ryan: How many paintings do you make in a year? Inka: I make about six large paintings and five small paintings or projects. Ryan: How long does it take you to make a painting? Inka: It takes about a month to make a painting, but sometimes I’ll rework it if I’m not happy. The reworking can sometimes take longer than the painting. Ryan: Do you collect art? Inka: No. I mean, I have some pieces that I’ve bought, but I don’t consider myself to be a collector. Ryan: What do you do in your free time?

Inka: I have a child. Ryan: What’s your favorite museum? Inka: In New York, I’m going to say it’s the Neue Galerie or the Cloisters. But maybe the Uffizi in Florence. Ryan: How do you know what to paint? Inka: Well, I don’t. There’s usually an idea I’ve had for a long time, and it’s a blend of some idea and what I feel like painting that day. Ryan: What does a typical day for you look like? Inka: I wake up, I go to the studio early-ish. I’m a morning person. I’m here by 8:30 or 9. I work all day, and then I go home around 5:30. Ryan: How do you know when a painting is finished? Inka: When it sits there and something isn’t bothering me. Ryan: And that’s how we know this interview is finished. Nothing bothers me anymore. n 211

Ryan McGinness is an American artist, living and working in New York, New York. He grew up in the surf and skate culture of Virginia Beach, Virginia, and then studied at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as an Andrew Carnegie Scholar. During college, he interned at the Andy Warhol Museum as a curatorial assistant. Known for his extensive vocabulary of original graphic drawings that use the visual language of public signage, corporate logos, and contemporary symbology, McGinness is credited with elevating the status of the icon to fine art through the creation of his paintings, sculptures, installations, and books. Concerned with the perceived value of forms, he assumes the power of this visual language in order to share personal expressions. The New York Times noted, “In the past decade, McGinness has become an art star, thanks to his Warholian mix of pop iconography and silk-screening.” Vogue declared, “Ryan McGinness is a leading pioneer of the new semiotics.” His work is in the permanent public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Cincinnati Art Museum, MUSAC in Spain, and the Taguchi Art Collection in Japan. ryanmcginness.com, Instagram: @McGinnessWorks

INKA ESSENHIGH Born in Bellefonte, PA in 1969 Lives and works in New York, NY

2006 303 Gallery, New York, NY

EDUCATION 1992–1994 MFA, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY 1988–1992 BFA, Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH

2005 Victoria Miro Gallery, London, England DA2 Domus Artium 2, Salamanca, Spain

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

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2004 Sint-Lukas Galerie, Brussels, Belgium “Etchings,” Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York, NY

2018 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “Inka Essenhigh: A Fine Line,” Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA The Drawing Center, New York, NY

2003 Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL Galleria Il Capricorno, Venice, Italy Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland

2016 “Between Worlds,” Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN

2002 Victoria Miro Gallery, London, England 303 Gallery, New York, NY

2015 “Stars and Flowers,” Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO

2001 “Works on Paper,” Victoria Miro Gallery (Project Room), London, England “Works on Paper,” Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY

2014 “Comet Dust & Crystal Shards,” Jacob Lewis Gallery, New York, NY Canzani Center Gallery, Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH

2000 Victoria Miro Gallery, London, England Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY

2011 Pace Prints, New York, NY

1999–2000 “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

2010 303 Gallery, New York, NY

1998 “Recent Paintings,” Stefan Stux Gallery, New York, NY

2008 Victoria Miro Gallery, London, England

1997 “Wallpaper Paintings,” La Mama La Galleria, New York, NY

2012 Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2018 “Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2017 “The New Frontiers of Painting,” Fondazione Stelline, Milan, Italy 2016 “Dead Among The Dead!,” Ellis King, Dublin, Ireland “Imagine,” Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy 2015 “The Ukrainian Diaspora: Women Artists 1908–2015,” Ukrainian Museum, New York, NY  “Painters NYC,” Páramo Galeria, Guadalajara, Mexico; traveled to Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños (MUPO), 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 Gallery, London, England “Pivot Points: 15 Years & Counting,” Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL 2012 “Fairy Tales, Monsters and the Genetic Imagination,” Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN; traveled to Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, 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, Massachusetts 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 of Contemporary Painting,” Visual Arts Gallery, 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,” ZKM / 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,” The Royal Academy of Arts, London, England  “Imagination Becomes Reality, Part III. Talking Pictures,” Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany “Motion on Paper,” Ben Brown Fine Arts, London, England  “Art on Paper 2006,” Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC

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2005 “Life and Limb” (curated by David Humphrey), Feigen Contemporary, New York, NY “Neobaroque,” Centro de Arte de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain 2004 “Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque” (curated by Robert Storr), SITE Santa Fe 5th International Biennial, Santa Fe, New Mexico; 26th Bienale de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil  “Funny Cuts—Cartoons and Comics in Contemporary Art,” Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany “Perspectives at 25,” Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX

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2003 “Painting Pictures; Painting and Media in the Digital Age,” Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany  “Comic Release: Negotiating Identity for a New Generation,” Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA; traveled to Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, New Orleans, LA; and University of North Texas, Denton, TX  “Supernova: Art of the 1990s 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 Fine Art Gallery, Washington D.C.  “Heaven & Hell,” Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York, NY 2002 “The Galleries Show,” The Royal Academy of Arts, London, England “Pertaining to Painting,” Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX, and Austin Museum of Art, Austin, Texas  “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 2001–2004 “My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation,” Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA; traveled to Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio; 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 2001 “Hybrids: International Contemporary Painting,” Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, England “Braille,” Angstrom Gallery, Dallas, TX 2nd Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany  “Works on Paper: From Acconci to Zittel,” Victoria Miro Gallery, London, England  “Casino 2001, 1st Quadrennial of Contemporary Art,” Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Ghent, Belgium 2000 “Greater New York: New Art in New York Now,” MoMA PS1, 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 on Contemporary Art, Seattle, WA “To Infinity and Beyond,” Brooke Alexander Gallery, 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

1994 “Juried Group Show,” First Floor Gallery, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY

1998–1999 “Blade Runner,” Caren Golden Fine Art, 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,” Wooster Street Gallery, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY

1998 “The New Surrealism,” Pamela Auchincloss Project Space, New York, NY “Wild,” Exit Art / The First World, New York, NY “Pop Surrealism,” The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 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,” 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,” Andre Zarre Gallery, New York, NY “Set Off: Inaugural Group Show,” View Room Exhibitions, New York, NY  “Anatomy / Intellect,” Stefanelli Exhibition Space, New York, NY  Featured Web Page Artist for December, Artists Space, New York, NY “Night of 1000 Drawings,” Artists Space, New York, NY

COLLECTIONS Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY  Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO  Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA  Tate Modern, London, England  Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

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Published in conjunction with Inka Essenhigh’s exhibition,

Photography Credits

Inka Essenhigh: A Fine Line, at Virginia Museum of

Page 23, 47, 55, 59, 61, 63, 69 Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

Foreword © 2018 Alison Byrne Essay © 2018 Heather Hakimzadeh Essay © 2018 Matthew Weinstein Interveiw © 2018 Ryan McGinness Front cover Treasure Hunt (detail), 2017 Back cover Lower East Side (detail), 2009 216

Catalogue designed by HHA Design, New York, NY

Page 25, 29, 35, 37, 41 Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York Photo: Zindman / Fremont Page 27 Courtesy Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY Page 31, 33 Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York Page 39 Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York Photo: Zindman / Fremont Page 43, 45, 49, 51, 53, 57, 65, 67, 71, 73, 75, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105 Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York Page 77, 109, 119, 121 Courtesy Victoria Miro, London / Venice Page 107, 123, 127 Courtesy Victoria Miro, London / Venice Photo: Stephen White

ISBN: 978-0-9994871-2-9

Page 111, 113, 115, 117, 125, 129 Courtesy Pace Prints, New York Photo: Carlin Mayer

Inka Essenhigh would like to thank Miles McEnery Gallery, Victoria Miro Gallery, Baldwin Gallery, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art’s Board of Trustees, Capital Group Companies, and The Rutter Family Art Foundation for their unwavering support. She would like to especially thank Miles McEnery and Daisy Hackett as well as Richard Edwards, Katharine Green, and Rachel Taylor. She would like to thank her friends Matthew Weinstein and Ryan McGinness for their brilliance and insights into her work. And, of course, to thank Heather Hakimzadeh and Alison Byrne. The exhibition and publication would not have happened without them.

Page 131, 133, 135, 137, 139 Courtesy Jacob Lewis Gallery, New York Photo: Austin Kennedy Page 141, 151, 153, 155, 157, 159, 161, 163, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173, 175, 177, 179, 181, 183, 185, 187 Courtesy Miles McEnery Gallery, New York Photo: Christopher Burke Studios Page 143, 145, 147, 149 Courtesy Baldwin Gallery, Colorado

Inka Essenhigh’s exhibition, Inka Essenhigh: A Fine Line, is supported in part by generous grants from the Business Consortium for Arts Support, the Virginia Beach Arts and Humanities Commission, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Major support for the exhibition was given by Capital Group Companies and The Rutter Family Art Foundation, along with many other generous donors.