Eva Hesse
Born – Hamburg, Germany 1936
Died – New York City, USA 1970
Eva Hesse fled Germany in 1939 after the Nazi pogrom. Her family settled in New York City, where she received US citizenship in 1945. Disturbing events in her early life – the war, her parent’s divorce and her mother’s suicide – may have established an obsession with the past, which she meticulously recorded in diaries. She studied art, first at Cooper Union and then at Yale between 1957 and 1958. At this stage, Hesse had not made sculpture. She used drawings as a means of sustaining her practice and as a way of exploring her deep personal anxieties. Her rectangles and bulging circles to the later, sharply-defined, “machine” inspired pieces. Hesse began to make freestanding minimalist sculpture after a trip to Germany in 1964. Her monochrome piece, Addendum, was first shown in Finch College Museum as part of a “serial Art” show in 1967. The logical arrangement of 17 semi-spheres is designed to contrast with the random fall of the cords. Elegant, erudite and erotic, Hesse’s work continued to excite until her untimely death from a brain tumour at the age of thirty-four.
Masterpieces:
- Hang Up
- Repetition Nineteen III
Text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.