Inka Essenhigh

Inka Essenhigh was born and raised in New York, where she still lives and works today. Her art is entirely dreamlike, with distorted and fluid visions populated by archetypes and anthropomorphized nature. The metamorphosis of subjects is a fundamental factor in her work, where inanimate objects come to life as figures straddling the line between existence and death—a thought encapsulated by her quote in an interview: "I wanted my work to have a connection with the world of the collective unconscious, the mysterious world of dreams and archetypes." Inka is part of a group of contemporary figurative painters in New York and is also associated with Lowbrow art, whose artists often adopt humorous and cartoonish tones in their works, such as "Haircut" and "Girl with Haunched Shoulders."