Esiri Erheriene-Essi: Reflections
Night Gallery is pleased to announce Reflections, a presentation of new paintings by Esiri Erheriene-Essi. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Based in Amsterdam, Erheriene-Essi created these works across an ocean, their arrival in Los Angeles a resonant offering—bringing with them the quiet weight of distance traveled and stories carried.
Across this new body of work, Erheriene-Essi carries on with her time-honored tradition of breathing life into inspired and discarded photographs, using paint, color, and layered ephemera to investigate memory. The artist works through her paintings with the same skill and stewardship as a quilter, threading together histories through texture and tone. In this new series, she embraces the flatness of photographic source material while deepening the emotional and chromatic complexity of brown skin—bringing dimension, variation, and luminosity to the surface.
This evolution is on view in A Royal Flush, a work depicting what the artist imagines to be a group of men enjoying their last days together before deployment to Vietnam. Their faces are marked by a spectrum of hues, highlights, shadows, and undertones, encapsulating the use of color as a tool to depict emotion.
An archivist and collector first, Erheriene-Essi begins her process by mining through estates and online repositories for faces and vignettes that speak to her. This collection has amassed across continents and oceans, from North America to Europe to Africa, demonstrating the diversity of Black identity, while illuminating the moments that are universal across all our memories.
Erheriene-Essi is deeply moved by the connection between the diaspora, not only across geography, but across time. Throughout Reflections she continues her exploration of this relationship. Motifs such as the Black power fist, the face of Toni Morrison, a “Dismantle Apartheid” pin, all time travel accentuating the meaning of timelessness within the collective memory.
In her dissection of memory, Erheriene-Essi is a visual anthropologist, reading images for context clues and filling their gaps with gestures from her own lived experience. In A memory from your youth (London Trocadero), a fan poster for Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour noticeably sits on the shirt of a girl eating ice cream in the 1970s. The artist’s temporal twist, fusing together past and present, melds Black iconography with earnest symbols of nostalgia. As an artist, her mastery of collapsing time ensures the continuity of the culture.
These paintings were created over the course of two years, in rhythm with the demands of motherhood—a theme that quietly permeates the work through the lens of legacy and inheritance. Erheriene-Essi sees her practice as an active conversation, one that begins with her paintings but is completed by the viewer’s own activations of memory.
The exhibition is titled in honor of the song by Diana Ross & The Supremes, a comfort album that has accompanied the artist through many seasons of her life, including the making of this body of work. The most apropos of the lyrics being:
“Reflections of the way life used to be.
Reflections of the love you took from me.”
In faded hues and frayed edges, Erheriene-Essi develops an architecture of remembrance, for what has been lost, and for which should never be. Her paintings become mirrors, not of the past as it was, but as it is felt. Reflection as a sacred act of reclamation.
–Shaquille Heath