HESSE, EVA

* 11.1.1936 Hamburg, † 29.5.1970 New York

Hesse was born in Hamburg in 1936. The family had to flee from the Nazis and sent Eva and her older sister on a Kindertransport to the Netherlands. After six months, the family was reunited and emigrated to New York.Hesse graduated from New York's School of Industrial Art in 1952 and enrolled at the Pratt Institute of Design in the same year but dropped out after a year. After attending a few courses at the Art Students League, she studied at the Cooper Union from 1954 to 1957 and received her BA from Yale University in 1959. During her time at Yale, Eva Hesse studied under Josef Albers and was strongly influenced by Abstract Expressionism.After graduating from Yale, Hesse returned to New York, where she made friends with other artists influenced by minimalism, including Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Yayoi Kusama and others. Hesse remained close friends with Sol LeWitt for the rest of her life and their friendship had a significant influence on the work of both artists.In 1961, Hesse married the sculptor Tom Doyle. In 1963, she had a solo exhibition of her works on paper at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York. Her early work consisted mainly of abstract drawings and paintings.

In 1965, the couple moved to Germany; Doyle had received an artist's bursary from the German collector Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt. They worked for a year in an abandoned textile mill near Essen - the machines and tools that had been left behind provided Hesse with inspiration for her mechanical drawings and paintings. Her first sculpture was a relief entitled ‘Ringaround Arosie’, which consisted of fabric-covered cords, electrical wire and brickwork.Her time in Germany marked a turning point in Hesse's work - from then on, she focussed on sculptures. Back in New York in 1965, she experimented with unconventional materials such as latex and fibreglass, which became characteristic of her artistic production. Hesse's interest in latex as a medium for sculptural forms has to do with its immediacy. In her artwork ‘Untitled (Rope Piece)’, Hesse used industrial latex and hung it on the wall and ceiling with wire once it had hardened. Hesse's work often uses several forms of a similar shape, organised in grid structures or clusters. Eva Hesse died of a brain tumour in New York on 29 May 1970 at the age of 34. Her works are exhibited at many venues including MoMA, Museum Wiesbaden, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Tate Gallery.