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Artist or Maker: Eva Hesse (1936-1970)
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Exhibited: New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Pasadena Museum of Modern Art and Berkeley, University of California Art Gallery,
Eva Hesse: A Memorial Exhibition
, December 1972-February 1974, no. 9.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum Weisbaden; Whitney Museum of American Art and London, Tate Modern,
Eva Hesse
, February 2002-March 2003, pp. 192 and 323, no. 125, pl. 63 (illustrated in color).
Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art,
A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968
, March-July, 2004, pp. 221, 223 and 448 (illustrated).
New York, The Jewish Museum,
Eva Hesse Sculptures
, May-September 2006, p. 62, pl. 7 (illustrated in color).
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Notes: Property from the Collection of Mel Bochner and Lizbeth Marano
Unraveling the mythology of Eva Hesse from the art is often as fraught a process as the objects themselves, but leaves in its wake a startling revelation of the depth of the artist's contribution to the post-war canon. Forging extraordinary physical entities with unique vision and heightened sensitivity towards diverse and untraditional materials, she nurtured an entire oeuvre in the latent spaces between the corporal and the cerebral, the organic and the mechanical, the random and the regimented. It is in contradiction-- and its inherent discomfort-- that Hesse's mature work finds its singular magic.
Mel Bochner, an early champion and close friend of the artist, eloquently locates Hesse's distinct and inimitable voice in the confrontation between erotic content and Minimal form. Untitled, 1966 which was presented to Bochner by the artist at a Christmas party thrown by the sculptor Ruth Vollmer in December of that year, elegantly evinces this exposition on the cusp of Hesse's initial brush with Minimalism. Created in the spring of 1966 (and coinciding with the historic Primary Structures show of Minimalist artists at the Jewish Museum) Untitled is a prescient evocation of the artist's subsequent grapple with Minimalism that summer when she created grid-enclosed circle drawings that led to relief sculptures made of grommets and washers in 1967. Apart from evoking the Targets of Jasper Johns, whom she greatly admired, Untitled is a step in the serial repetition of the circle-within-square format that would soon follow in Hesse's evolution.
In fact, Untitled introduces Minimalism to a former touchstone in Hesse's genealogy, namely, Ringaround Arosie, 1965, the artist's first relief that she executed in Germany. Bridging painting and sculpture, the latter featured circular forms built up with papier-mâché and bound with a tightly wound cord, set against a surface activated with torn pieces of paper and painted in delicate tonal transition. Alluding to sexual reproductive organs, the convex and concave mounds hinted at an evocation of the flesh. In comparison, Untitled features a uniform silvery gray spiral with an undoubtedly more machinist intonation. In close relation and conceived in the same period as Untitled, Compart, 1966 reveals the onset of Minimalist influence through its incorporation of serial mathematical progression in both the size of its components and in the amount of space between them. Indeed, along with Bochner, the artist's intimate circle in New York included Sol Lewitt and Robert Smithson.
Yet, for all Hesse's absorption of Minimalism, she retained an anthropomorphic bearing, the distinct mark of "absurdity" in her work. Compared to the hard-edged geometry, smooth surfaces and industrial fabrications of her Minimalist counterparts, the body invaded Hesse's work through their obsessively handmade process and the human imperfections that it entailed, as well as the distortions that she deliberately introduced in the skin-like striations, irregular lumpiness and sensuous tactility of her work. Neo-Surrealism -the "other tradition" -that competed with Minimalism in the sixties and characterized the work of such artists as Lucas Samaras, Lee Bontecou and Yayoi Kusama, was an equally if not more predominant force in Hesse's work. The element of the irrational, the fetishistic and the eccentric resonate strongly in Hesse's sculptures, defying their vague classification in Post-Minimalism. The element of the irrational, the fetishistic and the eccentric resonate strongly in Hesse's sculpture. Thus, despite its conception in Minimalist repetition, the slightly lopsided and unevenly wrapped circular spiral of Untitled emphasizes its organic properties over the purely theoretical tenets of Minimalism. Lucy Lippard observed that the modular and serialized formats of Hesse's oeuvre never intervened with their fundamentally hand-made qualities, and indeed, it is this aspect that is emphasized in Untitled.
Process comes closer to defining both Hesse's method and aesthetic compared to her usual and somewhat vague classification in Post-Minimalism. This is immediately apprehended in Bochner's word portrait of the artist, Wrap: Portrait of Eva Hesse, 1966. Featuring a circular form similar to that of Untitled with a single word describing Hesse's artistic strategy in the center, it is surrounded by synonyms from a thesaurus along its circumference. The viewer cannot read the words merely by standing in front of it, but must swivel around it in a physical act that mimics Hesse's process in creating works such as Untitled.
The strange beauty that pervades Hesse's mature artistic production from 1965 through her untimely death in 1970 is hauntingly evoked in Untitled. In Bochner's private collection for forty years, it is an ode to the artist's tragically extinguished star and testament to her lasting legacy.
