catching up with inka

Inka Essenhigh
(American, born 1970).
Deluge, 1998
Oil enamel on canvas, 72 x 72" (182.9 x 182.9 cm.).
Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund, 1998.

I think the first time I saw an Inka Essenhigh painting was in Buffalo's Albright Knox Art Gallery, when I was going to graduate school (Deluge-- above image). It was one more inlet of inspiration along the illustrative, pop-street style that I was flirting with cautiously, after having studied under painting teachers who were largely under the influence of the tail end of Modernism... who nearly gagged on their tongues when something got too decorative or narrative. I enjoyed the way Essenhigh seemed to capitalize on the recognizable structure of confident animation lines-- as if she'd whipped up a Disney film hallucinogenically into a rubbery storm of almost-characters.

Supergod 2004, oil and enamel on canvas-- Saatchi

In 2004, she was still stretching and morphing in this general direction. So it's with a bit of surprise that I have just encountered Essenhigh's more recent bodies of work, which are more influenced, it seems, by John Currin or Lisa Yuskavage than Disney (though less obviously sexual in nature than either of these artists of pornographic exaggeration). I can even see links to post-surrealist painters like John Wilde. Essenhigh's still warping off of an ideal, but now everything's gone soft and wickedly smiley, seasonal and almost pastoral, but not without an eerie light that forbids you to become too comfortable inside the swooping creamy lines.


Setting Sun
2005
oil on canvas

The work feels like it has moved more toward what, in Seattle, might be best suited for a venue like Roq La Rue, alongside artists like Travis Louie, or Marion Peck. And this is a full-circle, I suppose, since I am still a border-sitter in my interest between the contemporary art sanctioned by a sort of current academic ideal and that world of highly-polished illustrative imagination (among other camps).

I'm still not entirely sold on this new approach for Essenhigh, but fascinated to see an artist with an established name break with the form that put her on the map.