Woman of the Week – Eva Hesse

As we count down to the launch of the third and final volume in our ‘Pretty Brilliant women in the arts’ series in June, we’ll spotlight a remarkable woman artist every week.

It is not inaccurate to describe Eva Hesse’s life as a series of disruptions, the first of which occurred at the age of two, when she was sent away from her native Germany following the horrors of Kristallnacht. This separation from her parents, though brief, had a lasting impact on her.

Eva Hesse, Ringaround Arosie, 1965, vernis, grafiet, inkt, email, met doek bedekte draad, papier-caché, onbekende modelleerpasta, masoniet, hout, Museum of Modern Art

The second disruption came only six years later, before Hesse had even crossed the threshold of womanhood, when her mother took her own life. Hesse was left motherless for the second time in less than a decade. The emotional residues of these events imbued aspects of her work when she later tried to find her identity amid the male-dominated abstract expressionist movement, while balancing her desire to inscribe femininity into her work as she treaded the fine line between craft and art. In a 1965 diary entry she writes, ‘Do I have the right to womanliness? Can I achieve an artistic endeavour and can they coincide?’

In that same year, Hesse produced her work Ringaround Arosie (1965) radiating all the erotic surrealism of a Duchamp or an Oppenheim. The work was one of fourteen that Hesse made while on sabbatical in Germany, where she underwent the metamorphosis from painter to self-declared sculptor.

The final disruption in Eva Hesse’s life occurred in 1970, when she died of a brain tumour at the age of 34. Although her career spanned only a decade, it continues to have great artistic influence to this day.