Essex Flowers is pleased to present E.E. Ikeler’s solo exhibition of collage paintings, Horror Vacui.

Ikeler’s new body of work is a web of fragments: screenshots, selfies, and celestial maps network across painted and mosaiced surfaces. Materially voracious, the works combine painting and drawing with 3D pen, inkjet prints and cast tiles. These elements form a matrix akin to the basement wall of a pastel-obsessed sleuth, the sticker-coated binder of an oddball teenager, or the archeological dig of a YouTube rabbit hole.

Collage—a medium of incorporation and fragmentation—is a form and a metaphor. It materially manifests putting the pieces together, which Ikeler does with equal parts pleasure and unease. They take as a starting point Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, an aphoristic essay that imagines an angel witnessing human catastrophe. The angel hurdles backwards towards the future—as if catapulted from a blast—its gaze fixed on the growing pile of rubble. The image is both poetically and spatially evocative, suggesting a vast heap colliding against a flattened backside. Ikeler likewise compresses enormous quantities of imagery and information into intentionally shallow space. Benjamin’s worldview suggests that only by piecing together history’s shards can humanity find glimpses of redemption.

Conspiracy theorists also fit together incohesive fragments. In The Dialectical Fairy, Ikeler cuts apart the entirety of Benjamin’s text and glues it back together in concentric circles resembling geocentric diagrams of the universe. Benjamin’s essay becomes a closed (and disproven) map, with photos of UFO sightings and robots playing chess encircling the text. In this gesture, “putting the pieces together” is redemptive (radical angels) and/or stupid (flat-earth fairies). Benjamin fittingly calls his vision of history “Messianic time”. Here, we can guess at the undefined ratio of false to true saviors.

In January 18, 2026 (the artist’s upcoming 40th birthday), Ikeler pictures a cohort of Humpty Dumpties, the archetypal character of irreversible brokenness. This work, too, offers containment as a promise and a peril. The eggs crack inside a brick wall that forms a medieval-style enclosure; they are “protected” from an outer world but nevertheless broken. Only one Egg, perched atop the wall, remains whole. Ikeler seems to suggest that breaching one container (the city) keeps another one intact (the shell). The city’s shape and distorted perspective echo the video game Animal Crossing, paintings depicting the Garden of Eden walled off from the wilderness, and a Nazi-era board game called “Jews Out.” Keeping it together requires keeping [people, wildness] out.

In Hero’s Journey, Ikeler's doodled self portrait climbs a checkered field resembling the game Snakes and Ladders. Some of the snakes end in anodyne images like dogs and crystals. Others terminate at terrifying contemporary political graphics. There’s Uncle Sam asking YOU to join ICE, Donald Trump’s birthday card for Jeffrey Epstein, and a split United States. The viewer can imagine the Doodle-E.E. doddering along, sometimes ascending and other times—oops!—falling into fascism.

Broken shells allow inner and outer to collide, and Ikeler’s paintings simultaneously engage the self and the world. The Sky is Falling functions as a gloriously dense vision board of personal references, mostly concerning queerness and outer space. (Relatedly, Ellen Degeneres came out at the same time as a mass UFO sighting in Ikeler’s hometown of Phoenix.) The piece incorporates Ikeler’s personal history of image-making, including their childhood enthusiasm for their dad’s copy machine; their adolescent bedroom covered with floor-to-ceiling posters; and the text-based paintings of their adulthood. The images waft through a warm, sunrise-like glow of pink, lavender, and blue. Collage rests on rupture but also on integration, including within the self.

Horror Vacui, translated as “horror of the vacuum” or “fear of empty space” (or simply of “emptiness”), names the psychic impulse to fill-in. Like a cracked egg with a black hole at its core, the shards of collective brokenness collapses in on themselves. Ikeler takes stock of these pieces of digital debris, collecting and rearranging them to build something not only new, but better. They find meaning and joy out of the apparent bleakness and wreckage all around us.

Text by Rina Goldfield

E.E. Ikeler (b.1986) received a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2008 and an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2016. They’ve had solo exhibitions at Specialist (Seattle, WA), Hemphill Fine Arts (Washington, D.C.), Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson, NY), Mulherin (Toronto, Canada), and Kent Place (Summit, NJ). They’ve also exhibited at Pazo Fine Art (Kensington, Maryland), EFA Project Space, Abrons Art Center (NYC, New York) and Yve Yang Gallery in Boston, MA. Ikeler has been a member of Essex Flowers since 2021. They live and work in Brooklyn, NY.


Photos: Garrett Carroll