Eva Hesse

The amorphous compositions and tactile surfaces of her sculptural works allude to organic sources and reveal the artist’s working processes. To create Sans II, Hesse collaborated with a plastics manufacturer to cast sixty box-shaped units in resin and fiberglass. She combined these elements into five groups of twelve boxes (the Whitney owns two of these) and positioned them in a row. Despite the rigidity of the untraditional materials, the boxes appear malleable and retain the incongruities of their making. In the untitled 1969–70 scultpure, one of the last works she made before her death from cancer at the age of thirty-four, mutability itself operates as a key medium. To create this suspended work, Hesse had knotted ropes dipped into buckets of latex. When hung up to dry—an act that becomes part of the work’s process of construction and informs its presentation— the viscous liquid either adhered to the twisted ropes’ surfaces or dripped off, resulting in sections of tangled gnarls and sweeping loops. Hesse signaled her interest in such unpredictability in notes she made on a preparatory drawing: “hung irregularly tying knots as connections really letting it go as it will. Allowing it to determine more of the way it completes its self.”