Eva Hesse, Studiowork

Throughout her career, Eva Hesse produced a large number of small, experimental works in a wide range of materials, including latex, wire-mesh, sculp-metal, cheesecloth, masking tape and wax. These small works have often been called ‘test-pieces’ on the assumption that they were technical experiments. However, although some were ‘test-pieces’ in this sense, most were not and this book renames the objects studiowork, and offers a new interpretation of them - not merely as preparatory investigations for larger work – but as part of a consistent project to dismantle conventional ideas of sculpture.

A photograph of the studioworks accompanied the extracts from Hesse’s writings that appeared in Artforum in 1972 as an homage to the artist after her untimely death in 1970. This cliché of decaying fragments reflecting a life cut short did no service either to Hesse’s memory as an artist or to the pieces illustrated. This book contends that, on the contrary, the experimental work shows Hesse thinking about what sculpture could be. The radical ruination of the sculptural object as it was conventionally understood, not the life, is the important point. And far from subsidiary or minor, the book proposes that the studiowork demonstrates Hesse’s practice of thinking through making in three dimensions. The intense physical involvement and handling evident in their meticulous threading, folding, layering, cutting, stapling and wrapping, in an extraordinary range of materials, were at their most experimental in this work and show clearly the way Hesse embedded bodily and sensual feeling in the objects she made.

Written by renowned scholar Briony Fer, the book accompanies a touring exhibition of Eva Hesse’s studiowork which shows this radically experimental work in a new way, putting it centre-stage and offering an important reassessment of Hesse’s practice through objects that embody the material life of her studio.

This was a limited print run with only a few books remaining.

Author: Briony Fer

Published 2009

Isbn: 9780300134766

Dimensions: 270 x 185 mm

160 pages