Hesse, Eva (1936-1970)

American sculptor and painter, known for her unorthodox mixed-media works, which marked a departure from the rigid geometric forms that dominated 1960s American sculpture. Her work exerted a strong influence on younger artists, particularly women.  Hesse was born in Hamburg, Germany. In 1939 she fled Nazi persecution with her parents and sister and settled in New York City. After graduating from the High School of Industrial Arts in New York City in 1952, Hesse continued her studies at the Cooper Union School for the Advancement of Science and Art and at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where she received a B.F.A. (bachelor of fine arts) degree in 1959.  Hesse began her career as a painter, producing abstract expressionist works influenced by New York painter Willem de Kooning. In the early 1960s, she turned to sculpture. During a 1964 stay in Germany, she created one of her first relief pieces, Ringaround Arosie (1965, private collection), a pair of irregular circles made of varnished and painted, coiled electrical wires mounted on fiberboard. In 1966 her work was exhibited, with the works of artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Bruce Nauman, in the influential group show Eccentric Abstraction, at Fischbach Gallery in New York City. In the following years, her work was exhibited widely, and Hesse became one of the few women to attain prominence as one of a new group of sculptors, sometimes termed postminimalists, or process artists, who regarded the creative process itself as art. Her death from a brain tumor in 1970 cut her career short.  Typical of Hesse's tendency to undermine rigid geometry with malleable materials is Hang Up (1966, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois), an empty picture frame, wrapped in fabric and with a cord looping to the floor. She avoided monumentality in her works and emphasized the subjection of her sculptures to the laws of gravity by displaying them leaning, dangling, or lying on floors or pedestals. For example, in the series Sans II (1968, private collections), repeating elements made of fiberglass and resin lean against a wall. Untitled (1970, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City) consists of mysterious objects hung in nets or in tangles of string from the ceiling. Some works are freestanding, such as Accession II (1969, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan), a cube of galvanized steel inside of which are fixed hundreds of plastic tubes that suggest an interior coat of fur. Hesse also made numerous drawings in ink and gouache and kept journals and sketchbooks that stressed the highly personal nature of her art.