Inka Essenhigh by Miles McEnery Gallery

INKA ESSENHIGH

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY

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

INKA ESSENHIGH: INTO THE WILD By Phoebe Hoban

Inka Essenhigh’s canvases inhabit a world uniquely their own, an antic place floating somewhere between Japanese anime and Surrealism. Her strange, faux-familiar characters—think Dr. Seuss meets Astro Boy—populate a fantasy landscape that is equal parts futuristic and primordial. Essenhigh boldly bucks contemporary art trends to produce highly original work in a medium she has completely mastered—enamel paint, which has a smooth consistency and high gloss that gives her paintings an otherworldly sheen. That is fitting, because Essenhigh’s wild creatures and tangled topiary, captured in a seemingly constant state of morphing, emerge from what the artist describes as a “childhood place.” Unlike many artists, Essenhigh doesn’t start with a drawing. She begins her work with “a feeling, a memory” and intuitively navigates from there. “I might have an idea of a white tunnel, and what I do is I go looking for something, an image in my mind. I am actually looking for something very familiar. Something that is like a place in your heart. And then I will go ahead and loosely make something up with that feeling in mind. That’s the still life, that’s the study,” which ultimately leads to the finished painting. Essenhigh is adept at evoking singularly weird environments, strange, uncanny spaces that may at first glance seem reminiscent of something seen before, but soon veer sharply off into the unanticipated and unknown; Disney by way of Dali. These not-so-innocently conjured places can contain more than a small dose of danger, something akin to the enchanted enticement offered, say, by the clever goblins or wicked witches in classic fairytales, particularly those by the Grimm brothers, shaded with darkness. Essenhigh first came to critics’ notice in 1999, when she showed at Deitch Projects in her late 20s. By then she had already created more or less her own genre, using enamel to narrate her fantastically fractured fables in a graphic, linear style. But in 2001, while embarking on a large, ambitious canvas, she suddenly changed course, deciding to attack it with the conventional standard, oil paint, which she then worked with for over a decade, sometimes mixing it with enamel. In late 2015 she felt compelled to find something new and fresh, first experimenting with oil on aluminum before returning to her own original medium, enamel, which gave her graphically-driven and deliberately decorative work the precision—and sense of timelessness—she wanted.

“With oil paint I always got the impression that ‘this is the time.’ That this is the light, and it can only happen at this one spot at this moment,” the artist says. “Oil paint sort of suggests time and space and atmosphere. And enamel paint always suggests to me a sense of ‘outside of time, outside of space.’ Because it’s so flat, it’s so constant, it’s so unwavering.” Her latest series of paintings is a triumphant return to her roots, and then some. Like all good figurative art, Essenhigh’s work takes you on a secret journey; your own private Idaho. “It is meant to go into that place in your mind that is where your dreams come from, and to have that feeling of mystery, of sacredness, of the numinous or mystical. I think that there’s something that happens to your brain when you are looking at something that’s more illustrative. The art happens in your brain. It takes you to places. And I love that feeling.” Take Treasure Hunt. In it, a Gumbyesque, Grinch-like character is strutting into the woods, towing what looks like a baby carriage, but in fact is a suitcase containing a glowing treasure. This virtual Pied Piper’s mythically alluring pipe has been replaced by a rosy, impressionistic rendering of coins. We see only his or her back, yet the slithery blue form couldn’t be more seductive, as are the impish shapes that proceed it, marching off into a muted Maxfield Parrish palette of blue and gold. But the woods have eyes: a typically twisted black tree frames the action; at its base shadowy forms with faces featureless except for white, eye-like slits seem to be sipping champagne. Says Essenhigh of such characteristically ambiguous images, “They are meant to be funny, they are meant to be light. I think that what people might see as being kind of gruesome or grotesque, they will simply see as just decorative as time goes on.” In the mischievous Girls Night Out, the three elegant figures look like modern-day versions of Shakespeare’s Three Weird Sisters, whose famous chant, “Double, double, toil and trouble,” aptly applies here. The elongated figures of these fashionistas have a Japanese flair, particularly in the delicate delineation of hands and feet. In its exaggerated deconstruction of the female form—an earring here, a false eyelash there—the image also evokes Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. One witchy woman is gazing at her face in a compact; another dangles a black evening bag; the woman with false eyelashes displays a sexy sandaled foot. They could be Cinderella’s nasty stepsisters going to the ball, their slender silhouettes sashaying forth in search of unsuspecting prey, here slyly envisioned as an amorphous, green Ghostbustery blob. Essenhigh’s explanation of this hallucinatory apparition? “That’s the prize! That’s the object and the

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Paris, June-July 1907 Oil on canvas, 8’ x 7’ 8” (243.9 x 233.7 cm) Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. © 2018 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York The Museum of Modern Art Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

reason for their going out.” Like much of Essenhigh’s work, the painting’s figuration suggests an elusive narrative, but its rhythmic composition stands on its own, as does the fluid sense of line, shape and color that is the impetus of her art. Despite its distinctively figurative bent, Essenhigh’s work sometimes takes a minimalist turn, as in The Shape You’re In, one of the two more abstract paintings in the suite of ten canvases. An undulating white ribbon, framed on top and bottom by curving bands of star-studded grey, flows like a river; caught up in its current are three figures, one blue, one red and one green, that vaguely resemble an octopus, a human and a frog, representing, says Essenhigh, “different phases of the journey of life.” Midsummer Night’s Dream, another painting with an associative Shakespearean theme, is unabashedly pretty, its horizontal canvas filled with fairylike figures and bright, billowing blossoms. Says the artist, “It’s just about flowers and twilight, and that mysterious sense of space that you have in dreams.” Two white odalisques louchely lounge to the left of the canvas; there are also several slumbering yellow humanoid pods; “campers,” according to Essenhigh. The painting has a trippy quality to it, like William Morris on acid. As does the painting Party of the Flames and Flowers, a playful take on the interchangeable shapes of petals and flames. “I am interested in their evolutionary connection, like when fireworks look like chrysanthemums,” she says. Or are anthropomorphized. “It’s a party scene—the black lily is hanging out with the yellow cactus and there’s the flirtation with the flame.” The ornate filigree of flora and flames creates an unearthly scene; a vision from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or a tableau of aliens from another planet. Brazenly decorative, yet retaining its quintessential mystery, Essenhigh’s work invites you to enter an alternate universe, to become a stranger in a strange land. A land she beautifully reinvents on every canvas, where the inanimate seamlessly—and ornamentally—morphs into the animate, and vice versa. “I would say that I don’t have a choice. I try to get away from being decorative, and it always pulls me back in.” But, she insists, “Sometimes it’s edgier and more controversial to have a positive vibe. The thing that’s really important in all of these paintings is that they be alive. So that they are literally animated. And I don’t mind if they are like cartoons, Disney-animated, however it gets you there, so that things feel as though they have a presence; that they’re alive. My paintings are absolutely meant to give pleasure. They are meant for beauty. They are meant for your delight. And I think that this is incredibly political, because I believe that if you make delightful, beautiful things, that in fact you make the world a more n delightful and beautiful place.” Phoebe Hoban has written about culture and the arts for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, ARTnews, and The New York Observer, among others. She is the author of three artist biographies: Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (Viking/Penguin, 1998, 2004; and as an e-book by Open Road, 2016); Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty (St. Martin’s Press, 2010), and Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open (New Harvest, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

INKA ESSENHIGH By Rob Colvin

Yes, our actions are pictorial, our inventions are enormous, our thoughts are tragicomical, our temptations are burlesque, our desires are born of the flatlands, our paradises are made of dough and condensed milk, and our endearments are made of butter.—James Ensor (1924) Do you like green eggs and ham?—Sam-I-Am (1960) The dreamy reality of Inka Essenhigh’s paintings revisits a phenomena the poet John Ashbery saw in mid-twentieth century cultural sensibilities. In modern painting, he mused, “space is fine, but ‘dream’?” He continued: “We know we cannot stop dreaming, but we do not like to be thought of as people who dream.” Ashbery found the resistance to the imagination to be part of a larger misunderstanding of Modern art. Canonical movements such as Analytic Cubism, Suprematism, and the Bauhaus were thought to operate with quasi-scientific rigor, to bore down into the bedrock of reality. Ashbery disagreed. “The dream of escaping from dreams,” he challenged, “is a dream like the others.” Essenhigh’s body of work in this exhibition—with its socializing trees, its biomorphic beings traipsing toward the sun, and its gendered blobs of illuminated gas—taunts the viewer with more than clever scenarios of ambiguous meaning. Provocative indeterminacy has always been a central component of Essenhigh’s work. It asks the question Ashbery hit on: What’s the problem with dreaming? It can be called a problem, because Essenhigh’s insistence on “dreaming” has gotten her into trouble with critics—and she has not backed down. A quick recap: Essenhigh’s paintings of apocalyptic nightmares enjoyed meteoric success in the buildup to the year 2000. From the real nightmare on September 11, 2001, through 2003 or so, her international fame plateaued as her work became more coherently narrative and less prone to violence. She had an enormous fan base, but critics—not all, but a few—disapproved of her paintings since her works tilted toward narrative and often showing a propensity for complex feelings, or at least moods. She broke an unspoken taboo by crossing into the territory of sentimentalism, and her work began to take a stance of its own, a stance that is embedded in art history but in a part of art history with which

few contemporary artists engage. Essenhigh’s particular stance is a slippery one. By deliberately moving toward “popular,” even “populist,” art (that is, art legible to all) while fighting back, by way of her resilience, against professional naysayers, a contradiction formed in her work—a contradiction that she embraces and exploits. Imagine a Venn diagram. That’s where two circles are drawn to demarcate two categories or classes. At their overlap, a football shape is created. The contents of that area belong to both categories at once. The two categories for Essenhigh have been “high” art in one circle and “populist” art in the other. The football shape where these two intersect is where the action is. It’s unclear whether Essenhigh is deliberately tripping up critics with her artistic sentimentalities and magical imagery that is sympathetic to childhood cartoons. Yet one scenario that played out in the pages of Art in America serves as a proxy for almost all of the mistakes that have been made before or in its wake. It will be called “The Maine Mistake.” In a 2010 review, the critic Stephen Maine dismissed the painting Molly Waiting in a Field (2009) as “slick, sentimental garbage.” Molly, an implacable black mare, stands in a yellow field with her bold chest dead center. The critic was leery. He acknowledged that it could be “irony or not,” but he nevertheless disengaged. That was his contribution to the Venn diagram: holding “high” art expectations and looking for markers of “criticality” in the work to establish its sophistication. None were readily apparent. Instead, there was Molly, a striking horse that could be interpreted as the artist, Essenhigh, herself, at ease within the space of her own creation. She’s standing within a picture that unreflectively is easy to like and is perfectly sincere. What was she waiting for? Perhaps the snort of a critic. After all, it was Marcel Duchamp, the most seriously unserious artist of all, who said the viewer completes the art. The competing, and perhaps incompatible, interests of “high” and “popular” modes of art making are more curious than the basic Maine Mistake suggests. The dyadic opposition, like magnets flipped against each other, shifts in shape, and it surfaces in surprising ways. Take the word “sentimental,” for example. It’s considered too soft for seriousness, yet nostalgia, utopianism, and fantasies

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

Soga Shohaku (1730-1781) Shoki Ensnaring a Demon in a Spider Web, 18th century, Japan, Edo period (1615-1868) Two-fold screen; ink on paper, 62 1/2 x 68 in. (158.7 x 172.8 cm). AP 1987.07 Kimbell Art Museum Photo Credit: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas / Art Resource, NY

reside in many forms of “critical theory” or political ideologies. Ironically, these longings for society to be rightly ordered—an impossible hope—underwrite much of what is taught in art schools as critical thinking, with “discourse” and “interrogation” being its only real products. In this way, “high” art is fraught with baggage that weakens its principled rejection of the sentiments that Essenhigh introduces in her works with anthropomorphic gestures of moods and emotion. In other words, is there such a thing as the correct dream? Looking more closely at Essenhigh’s work, it is remarkable how little has been said of its graphic sexuality. A way to get at this is to reroute her under-recognized eroticism through Japanese art. It is known that Essenhigh has been influenced by Soga Shohaku (1730–1781), especially his Shoki Ensnaring a Demon in a Spider Web, a two-fold screen ink drawing at the Kimbell Art Museum. Examining the work of another artist of the Edo period, Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1865), is also helpful, even if his work has no direct bearing on Essenhigh’s. It is useful to point out the aesthetic likeness that his Hour of the Monkey (1816–1817) woodblock print has in common with Girls Night Out (2017) in the present exhibition. Kunisada’s work features renowned female impersonator Iwai Hanshiro V dressing as a woman with her robe streaming down in seductive arabesques. So too, Essenhigh’s women, grooming themselves, are constructs of self-fashioning, and we see them in a similarly voyeuristic manner. Of more importance, here, is another genre of art in which Kunisada excelled: shunga. Appreciated by men and women both, though kept private, shunga prints depict sexual scenarios that were shocking to Victorian sensibilities and continue to have a strong impact on viewers. Frequently, the male organ is scaled up to terrifying proportions. Yet the mood of the works is always one of pleasure and delight. Behind the three girls in Girls Night Out—intertwined and conjoined in Essenhigh’s elegant contour lines, which are making whiplash moves—is a gaseous green entity emerging from the nightclub door. Its central tentacle juts out and up, erect. The tip is shaped as you might now expect. The glowing blob is gendered, and it is creeping up behind the women. It is not exactly sinister, but it is suspicious

enough. This supernatural agent also appeared in an earlier work (not in the show), Power Plant (2016), seeping out from behind a black door at the base of a phallicized industrial tower. The sea green color carries connotations of radioactivity, foregrounding the phallus’s unnatural, even toxic, character. In Treasure Hunt (2017), three figures walk in succession down a path toward a source of light rising behind a tree. The slinky mother drags a rolling cart that appears to be gasping at the top, following her offspring, each one mid-stride. At the base of the tree are revelers, dark as the bark, pouring wine and smoking. The scene relates to an earlier scene in Essenhigh’s Fairy Procession (2016). The differences here are the cast of characters, the tree’s unique limbs, and what’s behind them. An elongated background shape enters the frame and eclipses the sun, at the top left, in the form of a large, alert phallus. At its base on the left are two parallel sets of “testicular” curves, echoing each other. The bulbous tip reaching toward the top of the painting is embellished by a few serpentine limbs of the tree. The limbs of this tree, as compared to their former iteration in Fairy Procession, are wiry-like hairs instead of winding, stout, and sturdy limbs. Here, botanical is transformed to pubic. The mash-up—of family frolicking and darker, subliminal sex—works on the earlier-described Venn diagram as counter-pressures at the overlap. Essenhigh is having her cake and eating it, too, with the soft and sentimental “here” and the salacious and sexual “there.” Essenhigh’s work has periodically been likened to Surrealism, which is now considered less “critical” than the movements that eclipsed it, like Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. What has been overlooked is that avant-garde art subsequent to Surrealism was more of an expanding, or cashing out of its possibilities, than a supplanting of it. The poet and painter Henri Michaux, for example, did not identify as a Surrealist, yet he said the movement gave him permission to do as he pleased (or “la grande permission”). In her work, Essenhigh has given herself permission to do as she likes; think of her invented places and people as products of Surrealist automatism, of free-associative imagining, if you will. This space of invention is where we find Molly, standing quietly, in need of no one’s permission but her own. The artist has a capacity to suggest without saying, something poets do with words, while what an artwork means is found only in how it feels. The people or the living entities in Essenhigh’s paintings reveal and conceal themselves by way of their own physical mutations and performative exaggerations. They are usually faceless, which is not to say featureless. Costumes and masks, for example, serve to

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

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

open up the expressive potential of their concealed wearers. Recall James Ensor’s way into the burlesque. “The mask,” he stated, “means to me: freshness of color, sumptuous decoration, wild gestures, very shrill expressions, exquisite turbulence.” Ambiguous anonymity is similarly a vehicle for revealing the human psyche in Essenhigh’s work, from dread and despair to delight and delirium. In Essenhigh’s rendering, trees can articulate fear, aggression, curiosity, pride, sympathy, and reverence. Their trunks, limbs, branches, and twigs are manipulated into anthropomorphic gestures without necessarily taking on human anatomical features as such. The feeling of social community is there, though it might seem overly theatrical, hard to fathom, or completely illogical. Studies over the past two decades have shown, however, that trees do interact and send each other signals and needed nutrients through latticed fungi in the soil. Fungal filigrees pass along trees’ searches for kin, as well as warning signals of ecological change. If one tree is dying, others will send it carbon. The artist’s extravagance with line plunges her work into a sense of the decorative; yet, this move comes with its antecedent in Art Nouveau. As Essenhigh turns categories of art in and on top of each other—self-assertive and critical on one hand, popular and pleasant on the other—the earlier European (and American) Art Nouveau movement rejected categories demarcating high art from low art; it insisted on the organic unity of every medium. An argument could be made that Essenhigh is making a logical extension to this stance in her conflations of artistic hierarchy, especially since her dexterous elaborations of form run against the grain of “deskilling” art. (Crudeness, in this trend of art making, signals authenticity.) Essenhigh luxuriates in line, likely as a matter of kinetic habit natural to her disposition. This gives her work an immediate appeal that belies the cross-pressures within it. The sincerity in the paintings of Inka Essenhigh is not a tactical rebuke to viewer restraint or the art world’s bent toward skepticism. That would be taking up “criticality” on its own terms of engagement. Her aim is more that of the “old” avant-garde dissidents whose anti-establishment attitudes and polemics were not sponsored by institutions. Wonder and delight, indulgence and fantasy, are ends in themselves. If a great poet once asked, What’s the problem with dreaming?, Essenhigh is n answering with a question: What great artist ever asked for permission? Rob Colvin is a writer in New York, NY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arbor Ignudi Fall, 2017 Enamel on canvas 84 x 27 inches 213.4 x 68.6 cm

The Shape Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re In, 2017 Enamel on canvas 46 x 72 inches 116.8 x 182.9 cm

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

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

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

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.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

INKA ESSENHIGH 19 April – 25 May 2018

Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2018 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2018 Phoebe Hoban Essay © 2018 Rob Colvin

Photography by Christopher Burke Studios, New York, NY Catalogue designed by HHA Design, New York, NY ISBN: 978-0-9994871-5-0. Front cover Girls Night Out (detail), 2017 Back cover Birdsongs (detail), 2017

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY