Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke @ Acquavella Galleries, NYC - Erotic Abstraction - Curated by Eleanor Nairne

Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke

Erotic Abstraction 

Curated by Eleanor Nairne 

Acquavella Galleries, New York 

Through June 18, 2021 

Acquavella Galleries presents Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke: Erotic Abstraction, the first exhibition to present these two pioneering artists side by side. Curated by Eleanor Nairne of the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the show features 23 works made between 1965 and 1977, including foundational works in the history of post-Minimalist and feminist art. 

Living in New York in the 1960s, Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke seemed at times to be working on parallel, if not entirely synchronized, tracks. Both turned to sculpture in the mid-1960s, and both became renowned for their experiments with form and materials, teaching sculpture at the School of Visual Arts at different times. Neither artist felt fully at ease with the language of Minimalism, which was ascendant in the New York art scene. As Eleanor Nairne writes, “Hesse and Wilke shared in the desire to adopt and subvert the strict geometries of Minimalism; softening the language of cool detachment with a sense of physical touch.” Bringing a bodily sensibility to the rigid and sterile structures of Minimalism, each artist in her own way created work that was evocative, organic and sensual. 

Central to this pursuit for both artists was the embrace of materials not widely used in sculpture in the 1960s, such as fiberglass and liquid latex. Erotic Abstraction features groundbreaking works from each artist in this highly expressive medium, as well as hybrid relief paintings and experimental works on paper. Ringaround Arosie (1965), made the first year that Hesse became fully engaged in sculpture, features a pair of mounds coming to a point at the center, each made of a spiral of electrical wire. Wilke’s Ponder-r-rosa 1 (1974) is the earliest work still extant by the artist made of liquid latex, a then newly-available industrial material whose use Hesse had pioneered a few years earlier. Presenting blooms made of folded circles of the soft black material bound together by metal fasteners, Ponder-r-rosa 1 shares not only innovative construction techniques with Ringaround Arosie, but also playful titles hinting at the works’ corporeal forms.

The exhibition includes important loans from The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Williams College Museum of Art, The Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive, Los Angeles, as well as many private collections.

A fully illustrated hardcover catalogue accompanies the exhibition featuring critical essays by curator Eleanor Nairne, professor and author Jo Applin, art historian Anne M. Wagner, art historian and curator Amy Tobin, and gallery director Michael Findlay.

ELEANOR NAIRME joined the Barbican Art Gallery in London as Curator in 2015. Her exhibitions include Imran Qureshi: Where the Shadows are so Deep (2016), Basquiat: Boom for Real (2017-18) and, most recently, the acclaimed retrospective Lee Krasner: Living Colour, which was shown in 2019 at the Barbican and the Shirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and in 2020 at the Zentrum Paul Kee, Bern, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. She has just opened Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty. Nairne is also a writer for publications including the London Review of Books and The New York Times.

EVA HESSE was born January 11, 1936, in Hamburg. Her family fled the Nazis and arrived in New York in 1939. She attended the School of Industrial Art, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and Cooper Union before receiving her B.F.A. from the School of Art and Architecture at Yale University in 1959. After returning to New York, Hesse worked as a textile designer, and in 1961 she was included in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and at the John Heller Gallery, New York. Her first solo show of sculpture was presented at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in 1965. Hesse began to use latex to make sculpture in 1967, and then fiberglass the following year. By the late 1960s, she gained critical recognition with solo shows at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and inclusion in many important group exhibitions. In 1969, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and after three operations within a year, she died on May 29, 1970.

Related Post:

Eva Hesse: Sculpture, Jewish Museum, New York, May 12 - September 17, 2006

HANNAH WILKE was born Arlene Hannah Butter in 1940, in New York. She attended the Stella Elkins Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, graduating with a BFA in 1961 and B.S. in Education in 1962. She used various mediums to challenge prevailing notions of femininity, feminism, and sexuality, and was one of the first artists to use vaginal imagery in her work with the purpose of directly engaging with feminist issues. From the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Wilke worked on creating a type of female iconography based on the body, constructing abstract, organic forms, often displayed in a highly organized and repetitious manner that recalled Minimalism. A large selection of her early terra cotta sculptures was first shown in 1971 at Feigen Downtown in Ten Painters, One Sculptor, curated by Michael Findlay. During the 1970s, Hannah Wilke began to use her own body for performance pieces as well as photographic work that she called her "performalist self-portraits." She exhibited widely both in the United States and abroad during her lifetime. In the late 1980s Wilke was diagnosed with cancer and struggled with the illness for the last years of her life. Before her death, she documented the ravaging effects of her illness and cancer treatments on her body in a series of self-portraits. These large, color photographs were some of Hannah Wilke's last works before she died on January 28, 1993.

Related Posts:

Hannah Wilke: Friendship, LaiSun Keane Gallery, Boston, February 18 - April 10, 2021

Hannah Wilke, Alison Jacques Gallery, London, 27 September - 21 December 2018

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES

18 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.acquavellagalleries.com

Eva Hesse: Sculpture at The Jewish Museum, New York

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.

THE JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK

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www.thejewishmuseum.org