EVA HESSE: FIVE SCULPTURES

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to announce the exhibition Five Sculpture by the artist Eva Hesse. Challenging the hard-edged, manufactured aesthetic of the prevailing minimalist movement of her day, Hesse’s use of latex, Fiberglas and industrial plastics opened new possibilities in art.

May 2 - June 26, 2024

Eva Hesse (1936-1970) transformed the language of sculpture through her pioneering use of alternative forms and materials. Half a century later, her groundbreaking oeuvre is as potent as it was in 1968, the year of the first and only exhibition of her sculptures held during her lifetime. That there have been some fifteen exhibitions in the decades following her death in 1970 is a testament to Hesse’s continued contemporaneity.

Hauser & Wirth will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the estate’s representation by the gallery by spotlighting Hesse’s remarkable achievements in ‘Eva Hesse. Five Sculptures.’ This exhibition, organized by Barry Rosen, longtime adviser to the Hesse estate, in collaboration with art historian and critic Briony Fer, reunites five of her most celebrated large-scale works, all on loan from major American museums and all made in the most intense period at the end of her life from 1967 to 1969.

Although similar in size and shape, none of the cylindrical forms in ‘Repetition Nineteen I’ are exactly alike, creating a destabilizing and uncanny sense of doubling. Hesse kept their arrangement open-ended, insisting that they should not have a fixed order. The result is a responsive and provisional installation whose overall shape varies with each presentation. ‘I don’t ask that the piece be moved or changed, only that it could be moved and changed.

‘Area’ (1968), on loan from the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus, was created in the summer of 1968 for Lucy Lippard’s landmark traveling exhibition ‘Soft and Apparently Soft Sculpture.’ For Hesse, ‘Area’ was important because of its underlying relationship to ‘Repetition Nineteen III.’ The artist explained: ‘‘Area’ is made from the mold of another piece, ‘Repetition Nineteen III.’ It is the insides that we took out.

‘Aught,’ borrowed from the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, is comprised of four parts, each the same size as those in ‘Augment,’ hanging side-by-side along the wall. However, each of the four segments in ‘Aught’ are comprised of two sheets of rubberized canvas that have been attached at the edges and filled with polyethylene drop cloths, creating a slightly billowing effect on the surface, provoking viewers to feel the tension in the space between painting and sculpture.

Finally, the monumental work ‘Expanded Expansion’ (1969), on loan from the Guggenheim Museum and made in the year before the artist’s death, embodies all her interests—especially her fascination with materiality, contradiction and absurdity. Hesse once described this piece as ‘opposite in form, large, looming, powerful yet precarious.’