This summer, Eva Hesse's “Expanded Expansion” resurfaced at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, 35 years after it was last shown. Along with it, there is also a group of Hesse's small experimental works, which are displayed in a manner similar to that on the artist's workbench, revealing a corner of Hesse's working state. Also on display are unedited archival video, audio, and interviews with artists in the studio, art historian and feminist activist Cindy Nemser. The Guggenheim has produced a short documentary about the restoration of the almost "undisplayable" "Expanded Expansion."

Eva Hesse was one of the most important American female artists of the 1960s, and she left behind a vast body of work and manuscripts in her short life of 34 years. Hesse originally used latex, rope, cheesecloth and other soft materials that were rarely used by sculptors at the time, inheriting but surpassing the abstract expressionism and minimalist aesthetics of the New York art world.

The art historian Robert Pincus Witten coined the term "Post-minimalism" in 1971 when she died to summarize a group of art represented by Hesse. practice. In her time, female artists, especially sculpture artists, were rare. The unique form and process of her works reshaped people's perception and understanding of sculpture, body and space at that time and even today.
Hesse was born into a Jewish family in Germany in 1936. Her family fled to New York in 1939, and despite leaving Nazi Germany, her upbringing was still shrouded in the shadow of the Holocaust. Her parents divorced in 1945, and the following year, her mother committed suicide. Hesse had made his artistic pursuit clear in his youth, and after graduating from the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1959, Hesse returned to New York to design patterns for a textile company to support his artistic practice. Hesse exhibited her own paintings for the first time in 1961, the same year she met and married the sculptor Tom Doyle.
In 1964, Hesse and Doyle moved to Germany temporarily, during which time she began experimenting with sculpture. Her studio is an abandoned textile factory, where she creates works in two and three dimensions using readymades such as tempera, gouache, metal, mesh, wire, string, etc. . The representative work of this period is "Ringaround Arosie". The plywood is covered with a paper glue mixture, wires, and varnished and glazed to create a central bulge that resembles a breast, a work between painting and relief. After 15 months, she ended her marriage, returned to the United States, and began to be active on the New York art scene as a sculptor.

The 1965 Hang Up, a work that marked the breakthrough in the Hesse sculptor's career, was partly placed on the wall in the form of a grey frame, and the other was 'projected' from the wall onto the wall. interior space. The frames on the walls are the result of sheets wrapped around wooden frames and then painted with acrylic paint, while parts of the space are made of steel wires wrapped with steel pipes and then painted with acrylic paints in an attempt to achieve what Hesse calls "the absurdity of extreme emotions" ( Absurdity or extreme feeling), it blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture, occupying, invading, dividing space, and at the same time containing space itself. The work begins to show a soft, organic, heterogeneous, non-monomeric quality different from that of the Minimalist artists that dominate the New York art world, especially the emphasis on the sense of touch. Hesse thus connects the work and the viewer's body in an intimate, humorous way in the space.
In the brief period between his cessation of painting and his death (1965-1970), Hesse continually devised new ways of making and presenting works, all of which focused on maintaining environmental instability. In Untitled [Rope Piece] (1969-1970), Hesse uses two ropes to be knotted and immersed in liquid latex. The ropes then harden with the latex, forming a mesh-like Heterogeneous structure. It is attached to the ceiling and walls at 13 points, but due to the properties of the material itself (the choice of this property can be seen as an artist's intention), these positions are not fixed. Hesse wrote this sentence on the concept sketch: "Hanging these knots at random as joints allows it to develop at its own will. The way it accomplishes itself is more to allow it to decide."

Hesse in the 1960s changed the immediate perception of the environment by gallery-goers at the time by placing works in such unusual locations as walls and floors meet at the time. And this idea of revealing its own production process is a theme inherited from abstract expressionist painters, that "painting is nothing but the act of painting". The process of sculpting becomes one of the centers of this piece, and the finished product is exactly how it came about. This approach also brings the viewer to another space, to the artist's studio, to a certain extent, so it is not difficult to understand the temporary and generative features of Hesse's works.

Another work, Repetition Nineteen III (1968), consists of 19 translucent cylinders about 50 cm high. Homomorphic repetition, in minimalist artists such as Donald Judd, became a derivation of a Wittgensteinian language, while Hesse's "repetition" manifested itself in 19 individual objects with handcrafted characteristics, similar to each other rather than exactly the same. Hesse has no restrictions on how the work can be displayed, so it can be presented in a different form each time it is exhibited.
Due to the fragile and changing nature of Hesse's materials, her work is most widely presented through photographs. As her works enter museums, a number of works enter the category of "studio works", and the restoration of works has also become the focus of discussion.

"Expanded Expansion" is currently in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and its first exhibition was the 1969 Whitney Museum exhibition "Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials". The work consists of 13 soft cells supported by fiberglass, and the individual cells are made of cotton cloth dipped in latex and then dried. The work is like a curtain of an industrial product, between natural and artificial forms, and each unit "organically repeats" each other. Durable resin, fiberglass, and latex that hardens, becomes brittle, and discolors over time. The tension inherent in the work shows Hesse's obsession with exploring themes of absurdity. Subsequent exhibitions of the work included a memorial to Eva Hesse at the Guggenheim in 1972, and its last exhibition was in the collections in 1988, when the work had aged and changed. "Expanded Expansion" remains in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum. Thirty years later, the museum has undergone roundtable discussions, references to Hesse's notes, material analysis and experiments, a visit to Hesse's assistant Doug Johns in the 1960s, and mock production tests. steps to complete the repair of "Extended Expansion". This almost brown-orange work, on display again this summer, is hard not to make viewers connect to their own aging. Perhaps as Eva Hesse's most often quoted passage says: "I'm not sure what my real stance on durability is. Part of me feels it's redundant, and if I need to use rubber, it's more important Yes. Life does not endure; art does not endure."
One of Hesse's most famous photos is the 1969 exhibition at the Whitney Museum. She is wearing a black polka-dot dress, standing on this large volume that coexists soft and hard, and is destined to age quickly. Before the work, she had just undergone a brain tumor operation and came to the museum exhibition site in a wheelchair. The dramatic folds of the latex material presented a kind of monumental sense of the industrial age in the photo, which made people almost forget it. Life is so short.
Carl Andre said in an interview in 1996: "Maybe I am the skeleton of the body of sculpture, maybe Richard Serra is the muscle, but Eva Hesse is the The brain and nervous system extend far into the future."

Article Source:艺术与设计

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