who is eva hesse

Born into a German Jewish family, Hesse was about three years old when her parents left their extended family behind and fled the Nazi regime, arriving in New York City in 1939. Her parents divorced in 1945, and her mother committed suicide a year later. Despite her traumatic and tragic early life, Hesse was an accomplished student. As an adolescent, she already wanted to pursue art, and she attended the School of Industrial Art (now the High School of Art and Design). She went on to study at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (from September 1952 to December 1953), Cooper Union (1954–57), and the School of Art and Architecture at Yale University (B.F.A., 1959), where she studied with artist Josef Albers. After she graduated, Hesse returned to New York City and supported her art by working as a pattern designer for a textile company. In 1961 Hesse exhibited her work for the first time in a show titled “Drawings: Three Young Americans” at the John Heller Gallery. She met and married sculptor Tom Doyle that year. Hesse’s first solo exhibition, a show of her drawings, was held in 1963 at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York City.
Eva Hesse, (born January 11, 1936, Hamburg, Germany—died May 29, 1970, New York, New York, U.S.), German-born American painter and sculptor known for using unusual materials such as rubber tubing, fibreglass, synthetic resins, cord, cloth, and wire. Hesse had a prolific yet short career, and her influence since her death at age 34 has been widespread.

Hesse graduated from New York’s School of Industrial Art at the age of 16, and in 1952 she enrolled in the Pratt Institute of Design. She dropped out only a year later. When Hesse was 18 years-old, she interned at Seventeen magazine. During this time she also took classes at the Art Students League. From 1954-57 she studied at Cooper Union and in 1959 she received her BA from Yale University. While at Yale, Hesse studied under Josef Albers and was heavily influenced by Abstract Expressionism.
In 1962, Eva Hesse married fellow sculptor Tom Doyle, and in 1965, the two moved to Germany so Tom could pursue an artist residency from German industrialist and collector Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt. Hesse and Doyle, whose marriage was coming apart, lived and worked in an abandoned textile mill in the Ruhr region of Germany for about a year. Their studio was set up in a disused part of Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt’s textile factory in Kettwig-on-the-Ruhr near Essen. The building still contained machine parts, tools, and materials from its previous use and the angular forms of these disused machines and tools served as inspiration for Hesse’s mechanical drawings and paintings. Hesse was not happy to be back in Germany, but began sculpting with materials that had been left behind in the abandoned factory. Her first sculpture, a relief titled Ring Around Arosie featured cloth-covered cord, electrical wire, and masonite. This year in Germany marked a turning point in Hesse’s career. From this point on she would continue to make sculptures, which became the primary focus of her work. Returning to New York City in 1965, she began working and experimenting with the unconventional materials which would become characteristic of her work: latex, fiberglass, and plastic.

One of the first to work with synthetic materials like fiberglass, latex, and plastic, Eva Hesse is best-known for her innovative sculptures, dubbed Postminimalist for the time and style in which they were made. Reacting to the rigidity and uniformity of Minimalism, Hesse’s sculptural forms appear soft, slack, and uneven, conveying a human sensibility. A pioneering feminist artist, Hesse desired, in her own words, to “challenge the norms of beauty and order.” Hesse’s painful childhood—having fled Nazi Germany followed by her mother’s suicide—significantly impacted her artmaking, prompting close friend and art historian Lucy Lippard to describe Hesse’s work as a “materialization of her anxieties.” Hesse’s artistic engagement with her own psychology is apparent in her Spectre paintings, where she uses muted tones and a thick and gestural application of paint to create haunting pictures reminiscent of Munch.
One of the first to work with synthetic materials like fiberglass, latex, and plastic, Eva Hesse is best-known for her innovative sculptures, dubbed Postminimalist for the time and style in which they were made. Reacting to the rigidity and uniformity of Minimalism, Hesse’s sculptural forms appear soft, slack, and uneven, conveying a human sensibility. A pioneering feminist artist, Hesse desired, in her own words, to “challenge the norms of beauty and order.” Hesse’s painful childhood—having fled Nazi Germany followed by her mother’s suicide—significantly impacted her artmaking, prompting close friend and art historian Lucy Lippard to describe Hesse’s work as a “materialization of her anxieties.” Hesse’s artistic engagement with her own psychology is apparent in her Spectre paintings, where she uses muted tones and a thick and gestural application of paint to create haunting pictures reminiscent of Munch.

Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft, and Design, Midcentury and Today, 2015–16
Inside the Visible, 1996
Four Centuries of Women’s Art: The National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1990–91
Born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Hamburg, Germany, Hesse and her family fled Nazi Germany for the U.S. in 1939. Hesse studied in New York City and at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. A year after her first solo exhibition, German collector Arnhard Scheidt invited Hesse and her husband Tom Doyle to spend a year in Kettwig-am-Ruhr working in an empty factory space.

She was a prolific writer
For some of her childhood and most of her adult life, Hesse kept a diary in which she recorded her thoughts and artistic desires. Published posthumously, her writings have been hugely influential in shaping the legacy of Hesse as a determined, self-assured yet anxious young woman. “Only painting can now see me through and I must see it through,” she wrote in 1960. “It is totally interdependent with my entire being. It is the source of my goals, ambitions, satisfactions and frustrations. It is what I have found through which I can express myself, my growth — and channel my development.”
Her short but extraordinary life is the subject of American Masters: Eva Hesse, now streaming as part of “Artists Flight,” which concludes Friday, September 14 at 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings) with a new documentary about visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

References:

http://www.wikiart.org/en/eva-hesse
http://www.artsy.net/artist/eva-hesse
http://nmwa.org/explore/artist-profiles/eva-hesse
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/blog/eva-hesse-who-was-eva-hesse-3-things-you-should-know-about-the-trailblazing-artist/
http://www.sartle.com/artwork/no-title-eva-hesse