Eva Hesse

(Germany-United States of America, 11/01/1936 - 29/05/1970)

Born in Hamburg, to a Jewish family in 1936, Hesse and her sister were sent to the Netherlands when she was just two years old in an effort to avoid Nazi persecution. Reunited with her family six months later, they eventually settled in New York City where she began her artistic training in 1950.

Enrolling in classes at the School of Industrial Art, and later briefly studying at the Pratt Institute, she eventually earned her BA in Fine Arts from Yale University in 1959. The psychological intensity and vulnerability that underpin her early Abstract and Figurative works produced during this time were heavily influenced by the displacement, instability and profound loss she experienced in her childhood.

Though initially trained as a painter, her continued struggles to reconcile her personal artistic development with her role as an artist’s wife in a predominantly male environment, led her to make a decisive turn toward sculpture in 1964. While living and working in an abandoned textile factory in Germany, she began experimenting with unconventional industrial materials she found around her, such as rope, latex, fibreglass and resin, that marked a crucial departure from the hard-edged geometry of Minimalism toward a more organic, process-driven and bodily aesthetic through which she transformed the language of post-Minimalist sculpture for the mid-century.

From her Minimalist background, Hesse continued with elements of repetition with variation and irregularity, although introduced tensions between order and disorder, and restored themes of memory and sexuality that had been abandoned by Minimalism, all fuelled by her emphasis on psychology and the expression of the individuality of the artist.

This, along with her use of materials that age, sag and slowly decay, challenged traditional expectations of sculptural longevity, foregrounding impermanence as a conceptual and poetic force. Her use of such materials has also sparked debate surrounding if, and how, to conserve for posterity that which was intended to decompose.

During her life, Hesse exhibited her work widely throughout the United States and Germany, and today, she is widely regarded as a pivotal figure in twentieth-century art, celebrated for her fearless experimentation and her insistence that art could be simultaneously rigorous yet vulnerable and profoundly human.

Image: Eva Hesse, No Title (1966). Nets, enamel, string, paper, metal and cord, 108 x 29 x 15 cm. Hauser Wirth.