Eva Hesse's innovative career as sculptor began around 1964. Up till then she had concentrated on painting which had evolved to include organic biomorphic forms. In the subsequent three-dimensional work she is known for, she embraced Process art, Serial art, Minimalism, industrial subcontracting, and Repetition. Hesse believed artmaking was an intuitive open process not to be confined by rules, and her ideas resonated with many other artists.
Read MoreThe 70 or so sculptures she completed incorporated a wide range of materials. These include papier mâché, sculpmetal, rubber latex, plastic tubing, rubber washers, Plexiglas and steel sheets, string, wood, polythene, metal grommets, cheesecloth, aluminium wire, and fibreglass. She was fearless in exploring different building techniques and incorporating natural processes like gravity. She regularly injected her work with humour.
Hang-Up (1966) shows a looping wire springing out of a wrapped-up rectangular frame on a wall, and attempting to escape by leaning out over the floor. It seems to allude to her own shift in production methods.
Hesse often displayed her working drawings alongside her sculpture. Untitled No.1 (1967) shows 25 delicate concentric circles, positioned in a 5 x 5 grid, rendered in ink wash and pencil with protruding cotton string in their centres.
Addendum (1967) presents a row of 17 grey papier-mâché semi-spheres, lined up on a board and gradually increasing in horizontal separation. Each has ten feet of cord dangling from its centre, down to the floor where it twists around and spirals. As well as showing a serial sequence in spacing, the work could allude to maternal love and a wider community of empathetic mothers.
'Accession' (1967–1968) presents a series of highly evocative, different sized, tactile open cubes, where plastic tubing is threaded into thousands of paired holes on the gridded Plexiglas or steel sides to create a vivid inside/outside contrast. It looks like weaving on the outside and densely packed furry tendrils on the inner, and with its sexual ambience seems to reference Méret Oppenheim's furry tea cup (Object (1936)), albeit a reversal of textures.
Expanded Expansion (1969) is a work of multiple sections of joined rectangular latex on cheesecloth 'skins' that are held up by poles leaning against the wall. It seems to allude to sheets drying on a clothes line, or a line of stretchers.
Untitled (Rope Piece) (1970), with its tangled hanging skeins of gluggy thread, string, and cord alludes to a much earlier Surrealist installation: Mile of String (1942) by Marcel Duchamp. Suspended from the ceiling it is a large frenetic scribble in space, a frenzied, knotted celebration of congealed chaos.
