Inka Essenhigh | Galerie Magazine

8 Must-See Gallery Shows Around the U.S. This May

By Paul Laster

Inka Essenhigh at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

Making the world a more delightful and beautiful place with her art, Inka Essenhigh paints dreamlike worlds and childlike fantasies on canvas. Mixing the imagined with the real, the 1994 School of Visual Arts MFA grad creates fantastical realms that are completely devoid of evil. Painted with straight-from-the-can, household enamel paints, her colorful compositions and high-gloss surfaces construct a spectacular vision of nature, where anthropomorphic trees, flowers and people occupy fairytale scenes.

The ten vibrant canvases on view, which were painted over the course of the past year, offer a lively array of mystical landscapes and surreal scenes. Giant flowers and plants explosively fill the frames of several pictures, while accumulations of petals and leaves form otherworldly figures longing and partying in woodland domains in other paintings, both large and small. Masterfully rendered and fluidly composed, the artist’s joyful canvases take the abundant bounty of nature to exceedingly playful and picturesque heights.