

Organized by the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. The public collections that hold her work include the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art/ MoMA, New York, NY Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA Tate Gallery, London, England Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA the Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. She is represented by Victoria Miro Gallery in London, and Miles McEnery in New York. Inka Essenhigh studied at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio (1991) and the School of Visual Arts in New York (1992-1994). Her evolution led her back into traditional oils and experiments in printmaking. She gained early renown through her use of enamels and a process that included the use of automatic drawing to find her subject matter. This exhibition will present 25-30 works from the range of mediums that the artist has explored.
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The full expression of a 21st century human hope, anxiety, and everything in between. Each painting and print is a moment of distilled vision and the emotions that accompany them. They are the forces that shape her world. Ghosts and gods, monsters and maenads edge their way onto her picture plane. Both settings find their way into the artist's consciousness, becoming manifest in allegory. Essenhigh spends time both in New York City and rural Maine. The narratives find inspiration from her environs. They are fantastic visions rooted in the quotidian. Her elegant line defines space, rejecting the straight and embracing the curvy, the organic. An old cemetery emerges from a hazy gloom.Įach scene is vastly different, yet they all clearly belong to Essenhigh. Anthropomorphic condominiums break from their moorings. A yellow beanstalk makes a frenzied vertical climb, snagging a golden crown with blue jewel as it grows. Swirls of light lead us up to a heavenly night sky. Her signature use of line follows her experimentation, keeping them grounded and giving them continuity. It is through this approach that Essenhigh’s dazzling works are borne. Throughout each phase of experimentation, she created dialogues with her work, navigating how the media and brush interact, sometimes with genuine surprise at the result. Her substrates have included paper, canvas, and panels. She has moved from using enamel paint to traditional oils and back creating hybrids of the two. Since her emergence into the art world during the late 1990’s, she has created a path for herself that consistently questions and redefines her relationship with her media. To learn more, click here.Through her painting, Inka Essenhigh provides an authentic voice. Kara Walker: Cut to the Quick is on view at Virginia MOCA through June 11. Her work is intentionally unsentimental and ambiguous. Walker conducts extensive research in history, literature, art history, and popular culture.
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Some highlights of the exhibition are the complete Emancipation Approximation series and images from the Porgy & Bess series. At Virginia MOCA, Cut to the Quick will be guest curated by Rouse with Virginia MOCA Senior Curator Heather Hakimzadeh. In addition to her curatorial responsibilities, Rouse composed original poems inspired by Walker’s works, which live inside the exhibition. This exhibition originated at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, TN, and was co-curated by former Frist Art Museum executive director and CEO Dr. Her powerful and provocative images employ contradictions to critique the painful legacies of slavery, sexism, violence, imperialism, and other power structures, including those in the history and hierarchies of art and contemporary culture.

1969) works in a range of mediums, including prints, drawings, paintings, sculpture, film, and the large-scale silhouette cutouts for which she is perhaps most recognized. A leading artist of her generation, Kara Walker (b.

Schnitzer and the Schnitzer Family Foundation. Virginia MOCA presents Kara Walker: Cut to the Quick, a solo survey exhibition featuring more than 80 works by Walker from the collections of Jordan D.
