Eva Hesse
Postminimalism emerged as a response to the dominant currents of Minimalism and abstract art that shaped much of the 1960s art world. Eva Hesse was among the artists who worked within and alongside that movement.
Born in Hamburg on January 11, 1936, Hesse held both German and American citizenship and died in New York City on May 29, 1970, at the age of thirty-four. She trained at the High School of Art and Design, the Art Students League of New York, Cooper Union, and Yale University. That education supported a practice unusually broad in its forms: she worked as a sculptor, painter, draftsperson, collagist, and textile artist. Her work engaged with both Minimalism and abstract art, and she remained associated with the postminimalism movement throughout her career.
The range of media Hesse employed — spanning sculpture, painting, drawing, collage, and textile work — meant that her engagement with abstraction took shape across several disciplines at once. She worked in English and produced her art within an American context while retaining German citizenship, a dual identity that marked her biography from her birth in Hamburg to her death in New York City. Her association with postminimalism places her within one of the more consequential artistic conversations of the late twentieth century.
Quotes by Eva Hesse
Mushy novels, pretty pictures, pretty sculpture, decorations on the wall, nice parallel lines - make me sick.
I am ultimately convinced that people must first be told that so and so is great ,and then, after a period of given time, they come to believe it for themselves.
Everything for me has always been opposites; nothing has ever been in the middle... My life never had anything normal or in the center.
If I'm O.K., I will abandon restrictions and curbs imposed on myself. Not physical ones, but those restrictive tabs on my inner being, on solely myself. I will strip me of superficial dishonesties. I will paint against every rule I or others have invisibly placed.
Maybe if I really believe in me, trust me without any calculated plan, who knows what will happen?
I have the most openness about my art... It's total freedom and willingness to work. I'm willing really to walk on the edge, and if I haven't achieved it, that's where I want to go. But in my life - maybe because my life has been so traumatic, so absurd - there hasn't been one normal, happy thing.
I should like to achieve free, spontaneous painting delineating a powerful, strong structured image. One must be possible with the other. A difficult problem in itself, but one which I shall achieve.
