‘Eva Hesse: Five Sculptures’: Humanity and Otherworldliness in the Artist’s Late Work – The Village Voice

The golden age of Eva Hesse’s art came after her untimely death. Just 34 when brain cancer killed her, in 1970, Hesse’s creative powers were at their apex — the large sculptures she was making during her last several years, which could winkingly resemble paintings and found kinship in fiber art, suggested the accomplishments of a wizened visionary. But it wasn’t until Linda Shearer, a budding curator in her 20s, organized an exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1972 that the breadth of Hesse’s innovation began to emerge from the fog of her epoch. After all, the 1960s art world had grouped Hesse under the genre du jour, minimalism, and its fuzzier echo, post-minimalism. Yet the density of Hesse’s ideas is about as maximal as it comes.

That posthumous retrospective, which traveled widely, overflowed with kinked geometries and soft surfaces ossified by latex, one of several commercial polymers Hesse began to incorporate during her furiously productive final years. Her vision was plentiful, otherworldly, sometimes social — sculptures such as Laocoön (1966), an 11-foot tower of cord and rope that resembles a melted cat tree, and Accession IV (1968), a steel box overgrown with tubing, radiate powerfully in tandem. They’re like objects uncovered in the same well-worn domicile on a distant planet, findings of interstellar archaeology, yet they’re also carnal, a balance revealed when we view her output in ample supply. Hesse’s late-career constructions bear the curves, asymmetries, and blemishes of flesh, even if they aren’t figurative or even brazenly anthropomorphic. The stark shapes and clean lines of minimalist contemporaries such as Tony Smith and Donald Judd were a sterile correlative. Hesse forged her own context.

Eva Hesse: Five Sculptures, an exhibition of work from the late 1960s at Hauser & Wirth, in Chelsea, can feel like a forced return to framing the artist as a minimalist. In part, this is caused by an inbuilt constraint. The rubber, plastics, and polyester resins that Hesse began to use in 1967 became frangible rapidly, and so assembling a pentad of her sculptures in 2024, four of which incorporate such compounds, is a feat of conservation and multi-institutional coordination. In other ways, Five Sculptures deliberately quotes the past: Two works, Aught and Augment (both from 1968) are arranged in the same way they were in 9 at Leo Castelli, a 1968 group show at the titular gallery’s warehouse space that staked out the shifting ground of post-minimalism. Aught, a series of four flat panels on the wall, mirrors the 17 thin slices of Augment, which are oriented on the floor like cold cuts packed for grocery shoppers in a graded pile. One can practically smell it, the most organic inclusion in an Upper West Side industrial space back in ’68 that was filled with other fantastic artists — Richard Serra, with his lead splashes, and William Bollinger, with his torqued cyclone fence, among them — who were scoping out a less rigid terrain than their minimalist forebears.

If Hesse were still alive, she might reject efforts to mend Expanded Expansion enough for the work to welcome a public. She might allow her creation a natural death. 

It’s a potent bit of interplay, but in general, Five Sculptures posits Hesse as the scarce subsisting examples of her late career enable us to see her — as a stony and technical artist, albeit one who intriguingly saw a picture plane in what were ostensibly sculptures. This handful of constructions is so spare in its installation, spread out across the sprawling floor plan of Hauser’s 22nd Street gallery, that it can make a creative spirit that was actually generous, sensual, and expansive seem laconic. 

No doubt: Whatever Hesse offers is worth a trip to Chelsea. But the Expanded Expansion exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2022 was perhaps a more successful example of how to build a show around the rarity of viable, surviving work. This predecessor centered on only one sculpture, plus a host of test pieces — provocative and strange, like Hesse’s larger opuses — and documentary material about the conservation and extensive repair of the eponymous 30-foot-long fabrication of cheesecloth and fiberglass she dreamed up in the depths of her sickness, in 1969. 

Expanded Expansion reappears in Five Sculptures, leaning against the wall at the end of a long gallery in a glorious undercutting of its monumental scale. The lack of contextual material means that part of the Eva Hesse story disappears, since the conversation about conservation has breathed new life into her work half a century after her biography ended. The art’s aging, which increasingly appears to keep apace with the average lifespan of a human being, introduces a conceptual thread to her oeuvre, a sense of mortality that speaks to her battles with terminal illness. Hesse’s late sculptures ask, decades after they were fabricated with chemicals both synthetic and not: Just how natural can death ever seem to those who remain among the living? How foolish and doomed, or admirable and optimistic, are our attempts to elongate life? These queries are not only the basis for philosophical thought, they birth practical questions within institutions. If Hesse were still alive, she might reject efforts to mend Expanded Expansion enough for the work to welcome a public. She might allow her creation a natural death.  

Though, critically, Hesse often wanted others to choose. The dimensions of Expanded Expansion and another sculpture included in the exhibition, Area (1968), are theoretically variable, and all that prevents them from being stretched out and contracted is the stiffness and fragility of age. Repetition Nineteen I (1967), the last work she made using papier-mâché before discovering the more unstable vitality of rubber, latex, and fiberglass, consists of 19 cylinders (now 18, one has been lost) that can be arranged according to a curator’s discretion. The work itself gives oblique instruction. The cylinders, located in a glass vitrine, are sometimes bent and always irregular, suggesting an arrangement that is random yet bustling with some sort of invisible social order, like a litter of suckling animals crawling around in their nest.  

To make every Eva Hesse show about mortality would be to disrespect the many levels on which her art may be received — the different senses in which it is alive. One, certainly, is the facet of its stark shapeliness, and Five Sculptures asks us to meet it there. The strength of a piece like Area is not only how it works with its peers but how it plays off blankness, its strange unfolding from the white wall, somewhere in between the train of a wedding dress and an unraveled cartoon character’s tongue. Elements that seemed at first uniform are revealed to be intricate, from its uneven, amber complexion to the wire stitches that suture its parts. We find a consistent, mutually enriching voice if we spend enough time with a quieter Hesse show like this one. Five Sculptures extends the works’ human side, but asks us to greet it halfway.  ❖

Eva Hesse. Five Sculptures
Hauser & Wirth
210 W. 46th Street

Daniel Felsenthal writes essays and criticism for a variety of publications, including the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the Atlantic, and is at work on a novel and an essay collection. He also helps fight for better pay and work conditions for writers with the Freelance Solidarity Project.