Inka Essenhigh is a storyteller for the technological age. Since the mid-1990s, she has constructed a cohesive visual universe, a virtual reality that draws from a diverse amalgam of influences: from Renaissance fresco painting, to the biomorphic, surrealist dreamscapes of Matta or Tanguy, to the ever-more pervasive fantasy imagery of Japanese animation and computer game-scapes. Essenhigh's mysterious, polymorphous figures move fluidly across vast expanses of radiant colored space. Owing much stylistically to the fragmented, tortured bodies of Picasso and Bacon, these creatures also function conceptually, as symbols to some kind of cybernetic metamorphosis or evolution.

Essenhigh creates a meticulous dialogue between abstraction and figuration -- folding bold colored grounds and Baroque linear arabesques into a resolved and highly finished surface. Initially using industrial enamel paint to create a sumptuous sheen across the picture plane more recently, she has reverted to the more traditional media of oil on canvas, laying less emphasis on artificiality, and more on the creation of an interior theatrical space through the process of drawing itself.

And it is this love of drawing which defines her recent body of work (concurrently on view at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, and 303 Gallery in New York). Whereas in the past these dioramas have seemed suffused with a cool serenity, here, the distorted forms burst and leap outward towards the surface of the painting. Using a looping, calligraphic line, Essenhigh has moved further from abstraction, to become ever more illustrative: waves swirl and crash beneath ominous dark skies, a writhing, tangled bio-mass is thrust towards us on giant beams of light, strange creatures twist and contort as if they are being consumed by some invisible force. Whilst such images are clearly allegorical visions of possible futures, they are also vivid and enigmatically enchanting. For Essenhigh, there is sublime power in nature, and great beauty in chaos.

Kate Zamet
November 2002