Eva Hesse: Sculpture
Jewish Museum, New York
May 12 - September 17, 2006
The Jewish Museum presents Eva Hesse: Sculpture, the first major New York City museum exhibition of this artist’s sculpture since 1972. Providing a rare opportunity to see the work of a great American artist of the 1960s, the exhibition focuses on Hesse’s large-scale latex and fiberglass sculptures, subtle and luminous works that are singular achievements of that era. Shaping her signature materials of latex and fiberglass into remarkably evocative forms, Hesse moved Minimalism away from its anti-expressive, systems-based aesthetic and, in two short years, helped to establish a paradigm shift in contemporary art. Also on view are significant earlier sculptures and drawings which show the creative evolution of the artist. The final gallery of the exhibition features documents that offer insights into Hesse’s life and chart the course of her artistic career
“Hesse’s work has maintained its powerful impact for decades because of its deeply emotional and evocative qualities,” observes Fred Wasserman, The Jewish Museum’s Henry J. Leir Curator, who organized the exhibition with Elisabeth Sussman, Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Wasserman adds: “Her large-scale latex and fiberglass sculptures in particular have a resonance that transcends the Minimalist art in which she had her roots.” In pushing the boundaries of her art, she fashioned objects that maintained both order and a profound and subtle emotional current, a potential for surrender, for chance or chaos, and even for absurd humor. Hesse’s brief career–she died of a brain tumor in 1970, at the age of 34–was highly influential in her use of materials, and in the way she made abstract sculpture reference the body and psychological relationships.
Hesse’s only solo sculpture exhibition, Chain Polymers at the Fischbach Gallery in November 1968, drew the attention of curators, dealers, and critics. The innovative works that she created for this show (including Repetition Nineteen III, Sans II, Accretion, Schema, and Sequel) secured her reputation and are at the heart of The Jewish Museum’s exhibition. Also on view in Eva Hesse: Sculpture are significant earlier sculptures and drawings which provide a context for the artist’s mature work, as well as later pieces that reveal how Hesse used non-traditional materials in the two years following Chain Polymers. The present exhibition at The Jewish Museum reassembles most of the objects from Chain Polymers as well as other key works from 1968-70, and contextualizes these sculptures with a few examples of Hesse’s earlier works: Ringaround Rosie, the Compart series, Ennead, Several, and the circle drawings. These pre-1968 works show the artist, initially trained as a painter, moving into three dimensions, creating biomorphic forms, shifting from color to graduated tones, and engaging with Minimalist strategies as she developed her own distinctive approach toward abstraction. After Chain Polymers she allowed a greater unpredictability into her art, embracing randomness and uncertainty. Such works as Connection and Contingent have a translucent, diaphanous quality that reveals Hesse’s keen sensitivity to the properties of light, which, in her view, became “part of the anatomy” of her last pieces.
The 35 works of art in Eva Hesse: Sculpture come from numerous American and European institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Museum, as well as Museum Wiesbaden, Germany; Daros Collection, Zurich; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands; and several important private collections.
The exhibition also showcases never-before-exhibited biographical materials that place Hesse’s artistic achievements in the historical context of her life and times. Included is an illuminating collection of diaries, letters, exhibition announcements, reviews, photographs, and other archival materials, most of which are drawn from the Eva Hesse Archives in the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. Visitors will also see unique family documents, such as tagebücher (diaries) kept by the artist’s father that chronicle Hesse’s early life. Combining narrative, documents, photographs, and collage elements, these lovingly constructed documents record the triumphs, catastrophes, and details of the artist’s life from birth to age ten, as well as the riveting story of the Hesse family’s exile and dislocation. Hesse treasured this record of her past, and The Jewish Museum is privileged to show these diaries publicly for the first time.
EVA HESSE was born in Hamburg in 1936 to a prominent Orthodox Jewish family. In December 1938, she and her older sister were sent to Holland on a kindertransport (children’s train) to escape Nazi persecution. Her parents followed a few months later, and the family came to reside in New York City, where Hesse was raised in the German Jewish refugee community of Washington Heights. Hesse knew at an early age the direction she wanted her American life to take: “I am an artist,” she proclaimed to her father when she was around sixteen. “I guess I will always feel and want to be a little different from most people. That is why we’re called artists.”
Eva Hesse attended the Art Students League, Pratt Institute, and Cooper Union. She subsequently studied with Josef Albers at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture, receiving her B.F.A. degree in 1959. At that point, she began to pursue her decade-long artistic career. She had her first one-person show, Eva Hesse: Recent Drawings, at the Allan Stone Gallery in 1963.
The next year, Eva Hesse and her husband, the sculptor Tom Doyle, were invited to work in Germany, where the couple stayed for 15 months. She completed her first reliefs there and had a 1965 solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf that included 14 reliefs and some 50 drawings. After returning to New York, she continued to exhibit and in 1966 was invited to participate in two key group shows. One of these, Eccentric Abstraction organized by Lucy Lippard, was at the Fischbach Gallery―the venue where, two years later her breakthrough solo sculpture show, Chain Polymers, would be presented.
In that 1968 exhibition she created artworks that highlighted her personal approach toward Minimalist regularity and her expressive use of non-traditional materials. In a statement for the show, Hesse described the tension that she sought in creating objects that would be both “something” and “nothing”: “I would like the work to be non-work. This means that it would find its way beyond my preconceptions. . . . It is my main concern to go beyond what I know and what I can know.” By the end of the 1960s, Hesse’s work had been included in a number of important museum exhibitions, including A Plastic Presence at The Jewish Museum.
“Hesse worked within a Minimalist vocabulary of industrial materials and serial repetition,” notes guest co-curator Elisabeth Sussman. “Yet she found that those materials and impersonal systems could be tempered. She chose to do this by introducing or allowing for rough edges, chance groupings, and the clash of smooth exteriors and irregular interiors.” Fred Wasserman comments, “Visitors to Eva Hesse: Sculpture will discover profoundly moving works that have not been seen together in New York in decades. It’s the chance for a new generation to see and appreciate Eva Hesse’s extraordinary artistic achievement.”
A catalogue, co-published by Yale University Press and The Jewish Museum, New York, accompanies the exhibition. The 192-page book features 33 color plates of works in the exhibition; an additional 103 color images; 26 black and white illustrations; essays by Fred Wasserman, Elisabeth Sussman, Yve-Alain Bois, and Mark Godfrey; and a chronology of Hesse’s life compiled by Beth Turk, Curatorial Program Associate at The Jewish Museum. It will be available for $50 (hardcover) and $35 (paperback) from the Museum’s Cooper Shop. The hardcover edition will also be available from bookstores worldwide.
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