Eva Hesse: Five Sculptures
Eva Hesse, Expanded Expansion (1969). Installation view, Eva Hesse: Five Sculptures, Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street. May 2 – July 26, 2024. © The Estate of Eva Hesse/ Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Matt Grubb.
At first I thought, “Eva Hesse made her name as a pioneer of post-minimalist sculpture in America,” was a great opening sentence, though it wasn’t mine. (It’s via Brigitte Reinhardt, Eva Hesse - Drawing in Space.) But then that fuzzy word: post-minimalism. Coined by Artforum writer Robert Pincus-Witten, post-minimalism is hard to define, though writing in a contemporary review, The Nation’s Lawrence Alloway described the movement as working “in opposition to the rigidity and regularity of Minimal art.”
The book from which the first line is culled focuses on Hesse’s drawings, the work of her first five years seriously pursuing art following her graduation from Yale where she studied under Josef Albers. The work in Hauser & Wirth’s current show—Eva Hesse: Five Sculptures, at the 22nd Street location in Chelsea—concerns the artist’s mature period, which she realized in the last five years of her life. (Hesse died in 1970 from a brain tumor at the age of 34.)
Hesse was born in Hamburg in 1936 to a family of observant Jews. A month after Kristallnacht, Hesse, then two, fled to the Netherlands, with her older sister, on one of the last trains out of Naizi Germany. After six months, the girls reunited with their parents and made it safely to New York City via England. Many families were less lucky. So when in 1964, her then-husband Tom Doyle was offered an 18-month residency in Germany, Hesse was anxious about tagging along. It took coaxing from confidant Sol LeWitt to convince her of the value of time devoted to one’s work. This moment is pivotal in the mythos of Eva Hesse’s career. She left America a draftsman but came back a sculptor. While working in an abandoned textile mill in Kettwig-on-the-Ruhr near Essen, Hesse began to incorporate the materials left behind and had a prolific spurt during which she made 14 reliefs. Hesse was 29 years old before she began making three-dimensional work. Another astounding fact: Eva Hesse only had one solo sculpture show during her life. There have been some 15 in the 50-plus years since her death.
One such was the recently mounted Guggenheim show, Eva Hesse: Expanded Expansion (2022). While that presentation only focused on one work, Five Sculptures offers up, as its title suggests, five reliefs and the opportunity to succumb to the spell of these splendorous aging pieces.
Eva Hesse, Augment (1968). Installation view, Eva Hesse: Five Sculptures, Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street. May 2 – July 26, 2024. © The Estate of Eva Hesse/ Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Matt Grubb.
The checklist includes Repetition Nineteen I, Area, Expanded Expansion, Augment, and Aught. These large-scale works, all on loan from major American museums, span the years 1967–69. In between this span of years, sculptor Robert Morris published his short, influential essay “Anti-Form,” which argued that the medium had come into a new phase, inspired by Claes Oldenburg, that saw “considerations of gravity become as important as those of space.” Gone were plinths. This new anti-form sculpture married Abstract Expressionistic interests in matter with Dadaist playfulness and chance occurrences.
For instance, Repetition 19 I (1967) features 18 bucket-shaped cylinders (one was lost) composed of paint and papier-mâché on aluminum screening. The original casting was rejected by Hesse as being too perfect, which led her to make each unit unique, slightly different in minute ways—a humanistic touch out of step with Minimalism’s clean lines and uniformity. Moreover, the buckets, each hovering around 10 inches tall, are not set up in any particular order. Hesse proffered they be organized randomly, left up to the whims of the curator.
Speaking of which, the show was organized by Hesse estate adviser Barry Rosen with art historian Briony Fer. Rosen and Fer do an excellent job in curating a cohesive show. It would have been tempting to present important Hesse works such as Right After (1969) or Hang Up (1966), but those two would have thrown off the sensual flow from one piece to another. Each would have drawn too much attention to itself, talking over the conversation the other pieces are having amongst themselves.
Eva Hesse, Area (1968). Installation view, Eva Hesse: Five Sculptures, Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street. May 2 – July 26, 2024. © The Estate of Eva Hesse/ Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Matt Grubb.
Area (1968) is a burnt sienna sheet undulating from the wall to the floor. It consists of rubberized forms sewn together hanging off the wall by metal grommets. Dimensions are given as “variable” because as Area ages, its accordion-like structure grows more and more taut. Hesse said of the piece: “Area is made from the mold of another piece, Repetition Nineteen III. It is the insides that we took out. And then I made it into another piece.”
The greatest piece in the show is Expanded Expansion (1969), a 10-foot-tall oranging curtain. The work is composed of 13 panels made from fragile rubberized cheesecloth that is supported by rigid Fiberglas and polyester resin poles. In a 1969 photo, Eva Hesse stands in front of Expanded Expansion at the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials. The work at the time was an off-white. How strange to see it tarnished, like an old pillow, after 55 years an earthy orange.
Getting didactic about her work doesn’t feel rewarding. This is why people seem so often to defer to Hesse’s own defenses while waxing poetic on her oeuvre. Lucy Lippard’s elucidating Eva Hesse (1976) is vital yet Lippard, who was a champion and friend of Hesse during her lifetime, is possibly too close to not psychoanalyze based on privy info. Some of the mystique of Hessa’s works is squandered when one relies too heavily on the artist’s own interpretations and defenses of it. That isn’t to say her voice is invalid; the issue is that Hesse’s arguments are so lucid one might falsely believe that her take on a work is the only way to understand its context. In 1972, Hilton Kramer accused Hesse’s work of being “difficult to appreciate.” I believe anyone leaving themselves open to Hesse’s charms will be rewarded. Leaving yourself open to feeling Hesse’s work will pay dividends over trying to pontificate on it. To do what I said I was avoiding and to quote Hesse from her much-quoted May 1970 Artforum interview with art historian and writer Cindy Nemser: “I don’t want to keep any rules. That’s why my art might be so good, because I have no fear.”
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