Curated by Briony Fer and Barry Rosen
The German-born, American artist Eva Hesse (1936–1970) played a central role in the radical transformation of sculptural practice in the 1960s. Hesse belonged to a generation of artists, including Bruce Nauman and Andy Warhol, who expanded the conceptual and technical possibilities for art. BAM/PFA is extremely privileged to present a group of rarely seen sculptures that show the inner workings of Hesse’s studio practice. In this exhibition, the art historian Briony Fer reevaluates these works, renaming them “studiowork.” She considers them as “thought-experiments,” works that capture moments of experimentation, where Hesse is trying out ideas and techniques and discovering new possibilities for her sculptural practice. Neither simply preparatory nor necessarily finished works, many of the studioworks exist slightly beneath the threshold of sculpture—but also question what we think sculpture is. They dramatize and draw attention to the open-ended nature of Hesse’s work as a whole.
Eva Hesse: Studiowork features works made from a diverse range of materials, such as plaster and latex, painted wood, metal, sculp-metal (a vinyl and resin suspension of aluminum powder that could be applied over objects), fiberglass, rubber, plasterboard, cardboard, cotton, polyester resin, cheesecloth, wire, string, paper, and nets. This exhibition also includes a series of largely papier mâché works never before shown in public. Hesse’s interest in using unconventional materials and in pushing the materials to their limits—in an attempt to achieve thinness and translucency, or formlessness and density—meant that she produced works that are both fragile and subject to deterioration. These transient materials make clear the temporal dimension of art: they have time built into them. Hesse was aware that she was producing works that were ephemeral, but this problem was of less concern to her than the fact that she simply wanted to work with materials that had a temporal dimension. As she stated in an interview with Cindy Nemser in 1970, “Life doesn’t last; art doesn’t last.” For Briony Fer, the value in these works is that “they are not universal and timeless, but leave us with a sense of a first encounter with things, the kind of encounter we had before we knew how to make sense of them.”
