Forms Larger and Bolder: EVA HESSE DRAWINGS

5 Sep – 19 Oct 2019

Hauser & Wirth, NYC

Forms Larger and Bolder: EVA HESSE DRAWINGS from the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College

This exhibition is organized by the Estate of Eva Hesse and Hauser & Wirth in collaboration with the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College.

An Ion of American art, Eva Hesse produced a prodigious body of work that collapsed disciplinary boundaries and forged innovative approaches to materials, forms, and processes. ‘Forms Larger and Bolder: EVA HESSE DRAWINGS from the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College,’ opening 5 September at Hauser & Wirth New York, 69th Street, illuminates the important role that drawing played in Hesse’s career. The exhibition encompasses 70 works on paper selected from the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s collection. Thanks in large part to the generosity of Helen Hesse Charash, the artist’s sister, the museum is home to over 300 works by the artist as well as the Eva Hesse Archives. 

The works on view range from early figurative sketches to experimental geometric compositions and studies of the post-Minimalist sculptures for which she is best known. Organized by Barry Rosen and Allen Memorial Art Museum Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Andrea Gyorody, the exhibition travels to Hauser & Wirth from Museum Wiesbaden and will subsequently open at mumok, Vienna in November 2019 and at the Allen Memorial Art Museum in September 2020. ‘Forms Larger and Bolder’ is accompanied by ‘Eva Hesse: Oberlin Drawings,’ a new 428-page publication by Hauser & Wirth Publishers that illustrates the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s extensive collection of Hesse works on paper. Edited by Barry Rosen, the publication features essays by Briony Fer, Gioia Timpanelli, Manuela Ammer, Jörg Daur, and Andrea Gyorody.

Eva Hesse

Born in 1936, Eva Hesse was one of the icons of American art in the 1960s, her work being a major influence on subsequent generations of artists. Comprehensive solo exhibitions in the past 30 years as well as a retrospective that toured from the San Francisco MoMA to the Museum Wiesbaden and finally to the Tate Modern in London, have highlighted the lasting interest that her oeuvre has generated. Hesse cultivated mistakes and surprises, precariousness and enigma, in an effort to make works that could transcend literal associations. The objects she produced, at once humble and enormously charismatic, came to play a central role in the transformation of contemporary art practice.

In New York in the 1960s, Hesse was among a group of artists, including Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson, who engaged materials that were originally soft and flexible: aluminum, latex rubber, plastic, lead, polythene, copper, felt, chicken-wire, dirt, sawdust, paper pulp and glue. Often unstable, these elements yielded works forever alive in their relativity and mutability. Hesse was aware she produced objects that were ephemeral, but this problem was of less concern to her than the desire to exploit materials with a temporal dimension. Much of the tumescent, life-affirming power of Hesse’s art derives from this confident embrace of moment. As she stated in an interview with Cindy Nemser in 1970, ‘Life doesn’t last; art doesn’t last.’

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http://www.nyculturebeat.com/?document_srl=3454464&mid=Art