Inka Essenhigh

Living and working in New York, Inka Essenhigh makes paintings that are infused with a symbolist sensibility. The artist has described wanting to paint ‘what was unseen, to find the life within things and animate them.’ Essenhigh’s first exhibition at Victoria Miro Venice will present new paintings from her ongoing series of botanical works in enamel paint, a medium the artist first worked with two decades ago. The distinction between the real and the imagined is blurred; even when making a straightforward image of flowers that exist in the world, there is still the sense that Essenhigh has invented them. Exact and delicate in their execution, these works depict a peculiar vision of nature and ecology that are complete forms in themselves. Eliciting a strange and compelling beauty, these flowers, as critic Barry Schwabsky comments, ‘might be growing on another planet.’