The precocious sculptor Eva Hesse, who died of a brain tumor in 1970 at age 34, is considered one of the titans of Post-Minimalist art despite the fact that she had only one solo exhibition in her lifetime, at New York’s Fischbach Gallery in 1968. Her artworks, made from latex, fiberglass, and industrial plastics, are extremely fragile and difficult to travel. Next month, New Yorkers will have an opportunity to see five of them in one place, all on loan from major museum collections, when Hauser & Wirth opens the exhibition “Eva Hesse: Five Sculptures.”
The five pieces set to go on view are Repetition Nineteen I (1967), a series of 18 bucket-like forms, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Area (1968), a group of rubberized forms Hesse made for critic Lucy R. Lippard’s landmark traveling exhibition “Soft and Apparently Soft Sculpture,” that is on loan from the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus; Aught (1968), a four-part piece on loan from from the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives in California; Augment (1968), a related four-part piece on loan from Glenstone Museum in Maryland; and the monumental 13-panel Expanded Expansion (1969), which stands 10 feet tall and 30 feet across, on loan from the Guggenheim Museum in New York. None of the pieces is for sale.
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The show, which is organized by Hesse estate adviser Barry Rosen, with art historian Briony Fer, opens May 2 at the gallery’s 22nd Street location in New York, comes complete with a publication (Eva Hesse: Exhibitions, 1972–2022) and a Hesse symposium, and features speakers including art historian Élisabeth Lebovici, and Hesse’s sister Helen Hesse Charash, with whom Hesse fled Nazi Germany when they were children.