Inka Essenhigh: The Greenhouse
Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Exhibition: 14 March–17 April 2025
Inka Essenhigh’s latest exhibition, “The Greenhouse,” at Victoria Miro, presents a series of paintings that delve into the liminal spaces between the tangible and the imagined, the botanical and the anthropomorphic. Her works invite viewers into realms where the boundaries of form and consciousness blur, prompting a reevaluation of perception and reality.
In AI City (2024), Essenhigh conjures a technobotanical utopia where sentient towers and humanoid gardens coexist in eerie, harmonious choreography. The figures here—part server, part shrine—appear both futuristic and priestly, as if charged with tending to a planet long past our own. Their glowing cores and flower-filled cavities suggest a form of knowledge both computational and spiritual, hinting at a post-human ecology where artificial intelligence has assumed the role of caretaker rather than overlord. Essenhigh doesn’t offer a dystopia or a salvation fantasy but something far more ambiguous: a vision of coexistence born from collapse, one where memory, data, and chlorophyll blur into a new kind of organism.
Similarly, “Ghost Pipes” (2024) presents an intriguing fusion of flora and human-like figures. Two entities, reminiscent of both plant stems and human silhouettes, emerge from rocky bases, seemingly engaged in a silent communion with a central, ethereal bloom. This composition blurs the distinctions between species, suggesting a shared essence that transcends categorical boundaries. Essenhigh’s work here prompts contemplation on the interconnectedness of life forms and the fluidity of identity.
Essenhigh’s The Greenhouse is more than a fantastical stroll through painterly foliage — it is, subtly but unmistakably, a meditation on climate anxiety refracted through myth. Her botanical beings do not warn so much as they remember: of eras before industrial time, before extractive logic. The glasshouse, in this sense, is not just a place of nurturing growth but a symbol of fragility — a sealed-off world at once curated and endangered. In her undulating forms and spectral palettes, Essenhigh offers not a polemic but a fever dream of ecological consciousness, where the boundaries between flora and fauna dissolve, and where the urgency of preservation hums beneath every root and tendril.
