Eva Hesse

Eva Hesse was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936 to Jewish parents. The family fled to Holland in 1938 and to New York in 1939.

Hesse studied at the Art Students League, then at Cooper Union and Yale University, where she received her B.A. in 1959. Her many (abstract) drawings of around 1960-64 show her working with "the shapes...with which she had always been obsessed--irregular rectangles, parabolas, trailing linear ends, curving forms and circles bound or bulged out of symmetry."

Her first sculptures date from 1964, during an eighteen-month stay in Germany with her husband, the sculptor Tom Doyle. Her first solo show of three-dimensional work, held at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in 1964, consisted of thirty-six drawings and fourteen reliefs made of plaster and cord, either tightly bound or loosely hanging. On her return to New York in 1965, she began to focus and clarify her forms and to work on a large scale. That year was her first period of great productivity and achievement; her earliest significant sculptures--Laocoon, Metronomic Irregularity, Ennead, and Hang-Up--were completed during 1965-66, and her work appeared in the important group exhibitions, Abstract Inflationism and Stuffed Expressionism(Graham Gallery, New York, May 1966), and Eccentric Abstraction (Fischbach Gallery, New York, October 1966). Both exhibitions were organized by Lucy Lippard, Hesse's early supporter and most astute critic.

From 1968 onwards she worked frequently in fiberglass, producing some of her most daring attenuations of sculptural "structure," as in the hanging, tangled fiberglass of Right After (1969, Milwaukee Art Museum). She was included in Robert Morris's Nine in a Warehouse exhibition, held at the Castelli warehouse in 1969 (as was Alan Saret and Richard Serra), and the important When Attitudes Become Form traveling exhibition of the same year.

Hesse became ill with cancer in the late 1960s, and died in 1970 at the age of thirty-four. She kept a diary since her childhood, the contents of which have inspired many accounts of possible parallels between her often traumatic life and her sculpture. Her work is closely associated with Minimalism, and is now regarded as a critical factor in the varied recastings of that movement throughout the later 1960s and early ‘70s.