These Sculptures Changed What Art Could Be, Then Changed Themselves
Eva Hesse, the German American artist, wanted her work to look “ucky,” and accordingly, many of her sculptures can make your skin crawl. They behave like skin themselves: irregular in texture, their craggy folds suggesting, unnervingly, something alive.
Hesse, a post-Minimalist of the 1960s (she died in 1970), dismantled the ideological scaffolding holding up what was considered art, often by reimagining industrial, non-art materials. But where others in that movement used rigid and impersonal plywood and steel, Hesse favored loose, often erratic configurations of rubber, latex and fiberglass, things that gave her sculptures humanity and softened Minimalism’s stiff contours.
The visceral pieces she made were like psychic maps, the drippy resin effluvia of her forms conjuring the trauma and absurdity of living. They spread across the floor and crept up walls, unruly and impolite, like little else art had seen before. “All I wanted was to find my own scene — my own world,” Hesse said. “Inner peace or inner turmoil, but I wanted it to be mine.”
Five of those latex and fiberglass sculptures, changing what art could be, have been reunited for the first time in over 35 years in an affecting exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Manhattan that closes on July 26. Their uckiness has only intensified: the latex drained of its elasticity, their color oxidized into a deep rust. They’re given ample breathing room across the gallery’s ground floor, cool and low-lit, which gives a revenant, sepulchral flavor. That they still exist at all, given the fugitive properties of their makeup, is a small miracle. That they’re together, the result of five separate institutional loans — from the Guggenheim, MoMA, the Glenstone in Maryland, the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum — is a logistical feat likely only possible for an operation as muscular as Hauser & Wirth’s: The gallery represents the Hesse estate, but even it could not appeal to the Pompidou Center in Paris, which declined to move “Untitled (Seven Poles),” from 1970, the last work Hesse realized.
The sculptures’ presence here and their current state asks potent questions about an artist’s intention, and when an artwork stops fulfilling that intent. Works that confront the messy, ecstatic and betraying facts of corporeality, they are not the same as when they were created — they’ve changed, as people change. Diminished, they’re more themselves than ever. Their active deterioration may be their best quality.
