You've Really Got A Hold On Me (for Jean Harris)

ESIRI ERHERIENE-ESSI (B. 1982)  

You've Really Got A Hold On Me (for Jean Harris)  

signed, titled, and dated '"YOU'VE REALLY GOT A HOLD ON ME (for JEAN HARRIS) (2021) ESIRI ERHERIENE-ESSI' (on the stretcher bar on the reverse)  

oil, ink and xerox transfer on linen  

53 1/8 x 68 7/8 inches (135 x 175 cm)  

Executed in 2021.

PROVENANCE:  

Private collection, New York

EXHIBITED:  

Belgium, Maruani Mercier, The Future Isn't What It Used To Be, August-September, 2021.

NOTES:  

Born in 1982 in London, Esiri Erheriene-Essi is a Dutch-Nigerian painter whose richly layered works investigate memory, Black cultural history, and the construction of diasporic identity through archival imagery. Drawing upon family photographs, found images, magazines, and personal ephemera, the artist creates compositions that blur the boundaries between portraiture, historical reconstruction, and collective memory. Her practice is deeply informed by the visual culture of the African diaspora, particularly the ways in which Black histories are preserved, obscured, or reimagined through domestic archives and vernacular photography. Combining painting with xerox transfer, collage, and ink, Erheriene-Essi produces works that feel simultaneously intimate and historiographic, emphasizing the emotional and political weight carried by images across generations.

You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me (for Jean Harris) is a painting built from collected lives. Working through a personal archive of vernacular photographs and found imagery, Erheriene-Essi brings Jean Louise Harris—the first Black woman to graduate from the Medical College of Virginia and later Virginia’s Secretary of Human Resources—into the foreground of a domestic scene layered with historical resonance. Behind her, a wall hung with photographs of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and other figures from Black American cultural life evokes the intimate, politically charged interiors of Kerry James Marshall’s Souvenir paintings, where personal memory and collective history collapse into one another.

The work combines oil, ink, and xerox transfer on linen, and its materiality is inseparable from its meaning. Processes of transfer, layering, and reworking speak directly to the instability of historical memory itself: what survives within archives, what is neglected, and what must be reconstructed through the artist’s hand. Erheriene-Essi does not simply recover overlooked histories; she demonstrates how painting can reactivate the archive, transforming static images into living, emotionally resonant spaces. The resulting composition feels at once deeply personal and historically expansive, positioning the domestic interior as a site where Black intellectual, political, and cultural histories continue to circulate and endure.

Erheriene-Essi’s work has been exhibited internationally, including presentations at the Kunsthal Rotterdam, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and Maruani Mercier, where You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me (for Jean Harris) was exhibited in The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be in 2021. She was awarded the Koninklijke Prijs voor Vrije Schilderkunst (Dutch Royal Award for Modern Painting) and was shortlisted for the prestigious Prix de Rome. In addition to her studio practice, the artist serves as a faculty member at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.