Eva Hesse
Eva Hesse was born into a family of observant Jews in Hamburg, Germany, on January 11, 1936. When Hesse was two years old in December 1938, her parents, hoping to flee from Nazi Germany, sent Hesse and her older sister to the Netherlands via Kindertransport. After almost six months of separation, the reunited family moved to England and then, in 1939, immigrated to New York City, where they settled into Manhattan's Washington Heights. Hesse graduated from New York's School of Industrial Art at the age of 16, and in 1952 she enrolled in the Pratt Institute of Design. She dropped out only a year later. Then, from 1954-1957 she studied at Cooper Union and in 1959 she received her BA from Yale University.
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In the beginning she would work abstractly with paint. She would make wild drawing that we interesting and new to what was happening in the art school scenes. In 1964 Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt, a German industrialist, offered an all-expenses paid artist’s residency to Tom Doyle for year of working in an abandoned textile factory near Essen, Germany. She could either go to Germany or stay in New York and work menial jobs while trying to make art with any time and energy left over. Ironically, the work on which her reputation was built began to emerge during this extended visit to the homeland she had escaped 25 years earlier. Her work is a cultural hybrid of American and German influence. Eva Hesse is associated with the Postminimal art movement. Hesse is one of the first artists who moved from Minimalism to Postminimalism.
After Germany she returned to New York City in 1965, she began working in the materials that would become characteristic of her work: latex, fiberglass, and plastics. Hesse’s interest in latex as a medium for sculptural forms had to do with immediacy. She began to use latex in a manner that had never been envisioned by the manufacturers.
After Germany she returned to New York City in 1965, she began working in the materials that would become characteristic of her work: latex, fiberglass, and plastics. Hesse’s interest in latex as a medium for sculptural forms had to do with immediacy. She began to use latex in a manner that had never been envisioned by the manufacturers.
Hesse's work often employs multiple forms of similar shape organized together in grid structures or clusters. Retaining some of the defining forms of minimalism, modularity, and unconventional materials, she created eccentric work that was repetitive and labor-intensive. In a statement of her work, Eva describes her piece titled Hang-Up, "It was the first time my idea of absurdity or extreme feeling came through...The whole thing is absolutely rigid, neat cord around the entire thing . . . It is extreme and that is why I like it and don't like it . . . It is the most ridiculous structure that I ever made and that is why it is really good."
By using dynamic organic forms with minimalist ideas, Hesse was able to integrate ideas of self and gender. Eva worked alongside, and sometimes competed with her male counterparts in minimalist art, a primarily male-dominated movement. Hesse is described as a precursor to the feminist art movement, where she did not take a political stance in her artwork, but she was an ambitious artist who was beginning to achieve some success at a time when this was rare. However, she has denied her work as being strictly feminist. Hesse defends her work as being feminine because she is a woman, but without feminist statements in mind. In an interview with Cindy Nemser for Women’s Art Journal (1970) she states, "Excellence has no sex." |
Eva Hesse died at such a young age of 34. She left behind a tragic personal life and legacy of art that made beauty of her lived experiences. Today, exhibitions of Hesse’s work are rare. The materials that she used towards the end of her life, such as latex, perish relatively quickly and, as a result, curators and collectors are reluctant to let her fragile sculptures travel. But Hesse didn’t worry too much about her legacy. “I am not sure what my stand on lasting really is,” she said shortly before her death. “Life doesn’t last; art doesn’t last. It doesn’t matter.”