Eva Hesse: Fragile Structures of Feeling

Eva Hesse

1936–70 | German/American | Sculpture; Conceptual Art; Oils

Hesse was a short-lived, deeply sensitive artist whose work was informed by her complicated background. Born to Jewish parents who fled Nazi Germany, she moved to New York with her family in 1938. Her mother committed suicide when Hesse was 10. She died of a brain tumor at age 34. The decade before her death was a period of extraordinary productivity.

During her short career, Hesse was one of the first artists to question the austere exactitude of Minimalism. Her works are irregular, fragile, and often appear to sag or collapse. She trained as a painter, but later experimented with sculpture and industrial materials, often using latex, fiberglass, rope, and wire. She embraced processes outside the standard modes of carving or modeling and bronze casting. She was committed to the accidental and the imperfect.

Hesse’s mature work abounds in contradictions, combining repetition with organic irregularity, order with chaos, and structure with fragility. Notice how this is essential to her themes: vulnerability, mortality, and the physicality of the body. Her works often show signs of aging—discoloring, dripping, and sagging.

Hang Up

Installation view, ‘Eva Hesse 1965’, Hauser & Wirth London, 2013 © The Estate of Eva Hesse.

Key Works: Hang Up, 1966 (Art Institute of Chicago);Repetition Nineteen III, 1968 (New York: Museum of Modern Art);Contingent, 1969 (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia)