News

Founded in 2018, Hauser and Wirth Institute (HWI) is a nonprofit, private foundation dedicated to transforming the field of artists’ archives by nurturing equity and innovation and increasing access to archives. The Institute is pleased to announce a new digital catalogue raisonné, Eva Hesse Drawings, developed under the direction of scholar Dr. Renate Petzinger and Barry Rosen of the Eva Hesse Estate, who previously collaborated on the two-volume catalogue raisonné of Eva Hesse’s paintings and sculpture. Originally planned as a print publication, Hauser & Wirth Institute provided the support to produce this first-ever compilation of Hesse’s entire body of works on paper as a free, online resource.

Our presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach 2020 will focus on masterworks by leading US based artists from across the program, in a presentation that bridges the experiential gap between the virtual and the physical that has come to define art encounters in the year 2020. Additionally, our new augmented reality tool will allow visitors to the online booth to ‘place’ artworks in their own homes.

Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt enjoyed a correspondence that lasted years. Their letters were emotional, personal and often about creative process. Early in her career, she wrote him with uncertainty about the path ahead. His response was an inspiration to her and an anthem for many who followed.

The conjoining of opposed formal, material, and aesthetic qualities has long been regarded as one of the most characteristic aspects of the work of the German-born American artist Eva Hesse (1936-1970).

Lightness and weight, line and volume, hardness and softness, transparency and opacity, liquidity and solidity, viscerality and evanescence, the synthetic and the organic, structure and indeterminacy, deliberateness and absurdity, abstraction and figuration, something and nothing: in Hesse’s work these paired terms are rendered indissociable without becoming unpolarized.

Such compelling tensions were first brought to an acute point in the colored relief sculptures and the ‘mechanical drawings’ (the focus of this article) that Hesse produced toward the end of her stay in Germany in 1965.

What does a creative breakthrough look like? Can it be something that ‘abounds with nonsense’? ‘Eva Hesse 1965’ attempts to answer this question with a focused, if at times repetitious, study of a pivotal period of Hesse’s artistic development.

First published in ARTFORUM in 1970, this rare interview with Cindy Nemser gives insight into Eva Hesse’s practice, totality in her commitment to making art and absurdist influences from Duchamp to Yvonne Rainer, all captured in the last year of her life.