Some observers see in these qualities latent, proto-feminist references to the female body others find in Hesse's languid forms expressions of wit, whimsy, and a sense of spontaneous invention with casually found, or "everyday" materials - approaches that show the diversity of Post-Minimalist practice.Īt 24, Eva Hesse was well informed on matters of recent art history, such as the Abstract Expressionist ethos of the New York School and its "second generation" response in the form of Color Field Painting. Hesse was among the first artists of the 1960s to experiment with the fluid contours of the organic world of nature, as well as the simplest of artistic gestures.Nevertheless, Hesse boldly forged ahead and made the most of her professional circumstances, ultimately to create abstract and endlessly evocative works free of any socio-political agenda. Hesse's life was plagued by various kinds of physical and emotional hardship, ranging from political persecution to familial illness and depression, not least of all her eventual suffering and demise from cancer.Much of Hesse's work might be thought of as a form of poetic, three-dimensional montage, a conjoining of disparate parts culled from diverse sources and combined, or arranged in ways that suggest moments of quiet reflection on the world around us.Mimicking the organic vulnerability of the human body itself, work by Hesse seems to take on a tentative or even ephemeral life of its own, its material density apparently enlivened by some invisible, psychological momentum. Professionally trained as an abstract painter and commercial designer, Hesse is a paradigmatic postwar American artist, much like Ellsworth Kelly, who regarded painting not as a two-dimensional surface, but as an object on the wall to be extended into the space of the viewer before it.Thus Hesse arrived quickly at a new kind of abstract painting, as well as a kind of so-called "eccentric," freestanding sculpture. She also experimented with expressing semi-whimsical states of mind rarely explored in the modern era until her all-too-brief debut. Reducing her means in the spirit of Minimalism, Hesse explored by way of the simplest materials how to suggest a wide range of organic associations, psychological moods, and what might be called proto-feminist, sexual innuendo. She originally pursued a career in commercial textile design in New York City, but Hesse's practice as an expressionist painter led her to increasingly experiment with industrial and every-day, or "found" materials, such as rope, string, wire, rubber, and fiberglass. Having fled her native Germany during the rise of Nazism, Hesse was originally schooled in American abstract painting and commercial design practices. Eva Hesse is one of the most renowned American artists to come of age in the immediate aftermath of The Abstract Expressionists.
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