Eva Hesse
(American, 1936–1970)
Biography
Eva Hesse was a German-born American artist whose innovative sculptural installations composed of textiles, latex, and fiberglass ushered in a new conceptual era of sculpture in the 1960s. Considered one the founders of Post-Minimalism, Hesse was inspired by her peers Sol Lewitt and Joseph Beuys and worked tirelessly to reject the status quo definitions of form and spatial relationships. “Chaos can be structured as non-chaos,” she once declared. Among her most important works is Hang Up (1966), a seminal exploration of space in the form of a long metal loop attached to an empty stretcher frame that broke the traditionally sacred role of the picture plane. The artist was born on January 11, 1936 in Hamburg, Germany and fled World War II due to her family's Jewish heritage, settling in New York's Washington Heights neighborhood by 1939. Hesse studied at Cooper Union until 1957 and then she pursued her BFA from Yale University in 1959, studying under then-head Josef Albers. She emerged from the avant-garde scene in 1966 with her inclusion in Lucy Lippard’s landmark “Eccentric Abstraction” exhibition. Tragically, Hesse died on May 29, 1970 in New York, NY from a brain tumor at the age of 34, ending a brief but luminous career that only spanned ten years.
Eva Hesse
(146 results)
.jpg "Untitled (4 works), 1960")
.jpg "Untitled (Bochner compart), 1966")
.jpg "Untitled (sketchbook w/ 6 works), 1965")
.jpg "Untitled (Test piece), 1965")
.jpg "Untitled (Test piece), 1965")
English (US)
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