INKA ESSENHIGH, USA, B. 1969

Inka Essenhigh is among the celebrated painters working today. Her masterly, dreamlike paintings translate her encounters with, and intuitions about, contemporary society into haunting, playful, sometimes disturbing visual scenes.

Essenhigh is part of a generation of artists that includes Rachel Feinstein, Lisa Yuskavage and Cecily Brown, that rose to prominence in 1990s New York as leaders in the contemporary return to figuration.

Employing a mix of automatism, imagination and “inner vision,” Essenhigh translates the visible world into arabesque compositions that suggest unseen worlds of energy, feeling and mystery lurking just beyond the surface of everyday life. These imaginative and highly abstracted landscapes invite viewers to temporarily abscond from the corporeal realm into a world of symbolism and mystery.

Essenhigh says: “The unknown comes from the painting process, putting brush to canvas. I do have an agenda, and a world I want to create. I’m not interested in meaninglessness. But I am looking for the feeling that the images are coming to me.”

Essenhigh sometimes engages with existing myths, fairy tales and fables, and sometimes invents her own. For example, the painting Daphne and Apollo (2012), inspired by the eponymous Greek myth, seizes the climatic, moonlit scene when the nymph Daphne, pursued by an aroused Apollo, is transformed into a tree after a desperate appeal to her father, the river god Peneus.