Inka Essenhigh: The Greenhouse
Victoria Miro gallery, London, UK
14 March 2025 – 17 April 2025
Is there a more fitting way to welcome the Spring Equinox than with flowers? Inka Essenhigh’s latest exhibition at Victoria Miro, which opened last Friday, offers an abundance of them—alongside lush botanical, landscape, and figurative motifs. Each piece feels like a unique musical composition.
Stepping into The Greenhouse at Victoria Miro is an immersive experience. The moment you enter, you’re transported to an alternate realm—one where each painting unfolds its own distinct world, meticulously crafted, governed by its own internal logic, and rich with narrative.
Born in 1969, Inka Essenhigh is an American artist based in New York City. Gaining attention in the late 1990s, she was recognized as part of a generation of young New York painters. Her work was included in the influential 1998 Pop Surrealism exhibition at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, and nearly a decade later, in MoMA’s groundbreaking Comic Abstraction: Image Making, Image Breaking (2007).
Her artistic evolution has seen a shift from the flat, enamel paintings of the 1990s to the more atmospheric, layered oil paintings of the mid-2000s, before returning to enamel—this time infused with the luminosity found in her oil work.
Recurring themes in her practice include mythology, landscapes, and the tension between urban and pastoral environments. Yet Essenhigh does not confine herself to specific subjects, instead blending abstraction and figuration to explore psychological and metaphysical realms. As she noted in a 2018 interview:
“I think about the archetypes and stories that we tell ourselves, and reenact in some way. We change our consciousness through storytelling all the time. If you want to change how people are thinking about something, you can tell a story about it. It does the job really fast. I don’t think I’m necessarily changing consciousness, but I’m painting another place. I would like my paintings to have that feeling—that other worlds are possible.” —Inka Essenhigh.
For this exhibition, Essenhigh set out to paint “what is unseen, to find the life within things and animate them.” Whether we perceive this unseen force as biological or mystical is as much a reflection of our own temperament as it is of the artist’s. She is interested not only in these forces themselves but also in how form—whether natural or human-made—shapes itself around them.
Her work reaffirms painting’s enduring power as a bridge between past, present, and future, posing fundamental questions about the world we inhabit while simultaneously mirroring it back to us.
Personally, I am attracted to her ability to explore how paintings imprint themselves upon us—how they work their way into our psyche so profoundly that we begin to see the world through them as much as we recognize the world within them. Essenhigh’s works, in many ways, embody a blooming consciousness. They stimulate the senses, heighten awareness, intoxicate, and transport—ultimately igniting in us the urge to look deeper and question more.
If you have the chance, I highly recommend experiencing this exhibition firsthand before it closes next month. If not, I’ve included some images below for you to explore—hopefully, they will serve as both inspiration and a glimpse into this mesmerizing world. You can also download a list of the works on view in this exhibition here.
Free Entry.
Scroll down to the bottom of the images to read the Spanish version of this article.
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