Eva Hesse
1936–1970
Between 1965 and 1970, Eva Hesse worked with diverse and sometimes unusual materials—from oil paint and graphite to latex and fiberglass—to create a body of abstract paintings, drawings, and sculptures that aimed, as she described it, to “go beyond what I know and what I can know.” In 1966, she executed drawings featuring grayscale circles placed within gridded boxes or rectangular borders. For her 1966 untitled drawing, Hesse used a compass to draft concentric rings and then filled the sections with ink wash to create the subtle gradation and cadences in the composition.
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.”
Introduction
Eva Hesse (January 11, 1936 – May 29, 1970) was a German-born American sculptor known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. She is one of the artists who ushered in the postminimal art movement in the 1960s.
Wikidata identifier
Q215457
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed December 12, 2024.
Introduction
Eva Hesse immigrated to the United States in 1939. She attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1952, Cooper Union from 1954-1957, and Yale University, where she earned her BFA in 1959. She married artist Tom Doyle in 1961 and traveled through Europe in 1964. She taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1968 to her untimely death in 1970. Hesse is best known for her sculptures that utilize latex and fiberglass and is often associated with the Minimalist movement.
Country of birth
Germany
Roles
Artist, painter, sculptor, teacher
ULAN identifier
500026528
Names
Eva Hesse
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed December 12, 2024.
