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Articles about Inka Essenhigh

Doing the Good that We Would

Jennifer Reeves, NY Arts Magazine, February 2003

There is an egregious poverty in the psyche of our pampered society. A callous disregard for the graces of spirit. We turn our backs on the fragile flowers of what is left of them. We walk away swinging out our arms in overblown movements, looking at our watches in an affectation of hurry while promising due considerations not now but later. Always later. Yet, the opportunity for grace is there, in us, waiting, still. The chance for survival, for resolution, is afloat because love isn't stagnate. It yearns. Recently, in the New York Times Magazine, Michael Kimmelman relayed again the news about painter Inka Essenhigh's sudden rise to fame and the obsession with her "photogenic face splashed on the pages of glossy magazines." Beyond this and reiterating the pitch of the gallery's press release, precious little space was devoted to a serious consideration of her work.
Read the entire article Source: (jenniferreeves.com)

Symbionts: The Art of Inka Essenhigh by Adrian Gargett

"I was a realistic painter but found myself with nothing to paint so I became an Abstract Expressionist. Once I got rid of all the painterliness and heightened the palette, got rid of all the messy problems of dealing with the weight of art history, then I was free to make dumb things. I could paint whatever came into my head. Because it "seemed" light I gave myself the freedom to do whatever I wanted." (Inka Essenhigh) The Self of painting today, just as other modes of articulation, phases from logic to poesie and back, and finds itself in the most complex time and space for semantic redefinition and re-evaluation. It conditions itself critically with pairs of cancelling metaphors.

The collapse of categories of the high pragmatic structures of Modernism, self-referentially, homogeneity, surface and facture and the modalities of heroic scale/gesture, are replaced by the virus of excess. As the social apparatus finds itself in a broken zone, so does the trajectory of the body, the hierarchy of signs, and all the familiarities become fragmented. Knowledge, information, representation and geometries find themselves in a totality of fragmentation and displacement. Displacements and condensation are connected to the fissure of discourse between topologies of discourse and its inner voids. Death and Desire. Read the entire article
Source: (www.getunderground.com)

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Other artists in The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today Jaishri Abichandani | Mansoor Ali | Kriti Arora | Ajit Chauhan | Shezad Dawood | Atul Dodiya | Chitra Ganesh | Probir Gupta | Sakshi Gupta | Subodh Gupta | Tushar Joag | Jitish Kallat | Reena Saini Kallat | Bharti Kher | Rajan Krishnan | Huma Mulji | Pushpamala N | Yamini Nayar | Justin Ponmany | Rajesh Ram | Rashid Rana | T.V. Santhosh | Schandra Singh | Tallur L.N | Hema Upadhyay | T Venkanna |

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