Press release

Baldwin Gallery is endlessly delighted to present its first show with internationally acclaimed contemporary painter Inka Essenhigh. In Essenhigh’s vivid and densely storied paintings and works on paper, figures advance in variously identifiable stages like post-pupae, mid-chrysalis jumbled metamorphosis: tentacles curl protectively around ethereal feather crowns, and half-grimaces advance, writhing, crawling and anthropomorphizing from the kudzu sap of the kudamas (*Japanese dryads of the most kawaii-est sort). In Essenhigh’s works, folkloric and mythological avatars assemble like loan-words: the viewer’s familiarity with the iconography is (safely) assumed even if only half remembered, or culturally remembered. Shakespeare’s faery twilight rolls easily over the proto-surreal Henry Fuseli, and hand to hand passes itself straight through Dali’s abstractionist realities, sampling northern European mythological files, with a dirty little sweetly secret Kate Greenaway-itude at the unwholesome sticky center of Essenhigh’s psilocybic mushroom. In Essenhigh’s hand the murky twilight spreads like stain, alone and palely loitering: more LED than fauve in the post digital effects the manga inflected Phantastes themselves demand.

Inka Essenhigh has has been shown widely at galleries and museums around the world including SMAK in Belgium, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Bienal de São Paulo, SITE Santa Fe, MOMA in New York, and the Royal Academy in London. Her work is featured in several prestigious public collections including the Albright Knox Art Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Tate Gallery and the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Baldwin Gallery is also proudly presenting our fourth show with multi-media contemporary artist Matthew Weinstein. Weinstein is a young artist with visions of iconography. In the current body of work, Victorian sci-fi strange spirituality suspends in a media-mix of the digitally generated, (vector-plotted ‘drawings’), the classically traditioned (sumi ink), and the affectless (acrylic airbrush). Weinstein takes his inspiration from Raymond Roussel’s epic ‘New Impressions of Africa’, and the relatant correspondence with illustrator Henri Zo. In Weinstein’s resultant steampunk inflection, these ‘vacancies populated by impossible machines and humans performing unmotivated actions’ become great and powerful — orions ruling the firmament, as powerful and impassive as the deities they seek to supersede.

Both born and based in New York City, Matthew Weinstein earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1987. His art has been exhibited in Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, the Netherlands, Italy, and the United States.

Images are available upon request. Please call 970.920.9797 for further information.