Just Looking | Eva Hesse

Last week, a group of art-world heavy hitters (editors, writers, curators, etc.), led by the peripatetic London-based Swiss art dealer Ivan Wirth, were gathered around a large table in the back room of his New York gallery, Hauser & Wirth on East 69th Street, gazing with rapt attention at fragmentary objects that were close to nothing. Hauser & Wirth represents the estate of the sculptor Eva Hesse (1936-70), and assembled on the table were essentially outtakes from her studio— delicate, insistently handmade studies in papier-caché (a version of papier-mâché), cheesecloth and bits of adhesive. Not quite works in their own right, they were still riveting in their suggestion of themes that had preoccupied Hesse throughout her decade-long career (cut short by her death from brain cancer at age 34): plasticity, an engagement with ephemeral materials, the elusive and incomplete nature of memory, and a redolent corporeality.

I had just returned from Paris, where in the Pompidou Center’s exhibition “Elles” (a re-hanging of the museum’s permanent collection, focusing exclusively on works by women), Hesse’s untitled large-scale sculpture from 1970 — seven serpentine, L-shaped fiberglass and resin forms, straining skyward — was the most alive thing in the room.

The exhibition, which remains on view at the Pompidou Center through early 2011, took its name from the American art critic Lucy Lippard’s 1966 show, “Eccentric Abstractions.” Lippard was one of Hesse’s earliest champions; her 1976 monograph on the artist (designed by Sol LeWitt), with one of Hesse’s iconic circle drawings on its cover, kept the memory of the artist’s work alive through years of relative neglect.

I first encountered Hesse’s work in her 1992 retrospective at the Yale University Art Gallery. Traveling back from New York to New Haven, where I had spent long years of study in the arid deserts of critical theory, I was struck with the force of revelation. Here was an artist working in the most sophisticated formal vocabulary of her time, and yet her works were loopily, hauntingly personal, seeming to emerge as much from within her own body as from the art of her day. They inhabit a netherworld between cool, minimalist abstraction and a mysterious, unnerving eroticism.

The wisplike objects currently on view at Hauser & Wirth (imbued with the frailty of thought) are part of a traveling exhibition that was shown at the Camden Art Center in London last year and will move on to Barcelona, Spain; Toronto; and Berkeley, Calif. When he visited the show, Wirth, who is 40, said he was probably the oldest person in the room. “She is constantly being rediscovered by new generations,” he said of Hesse, who because of her death remains perennially poised at that moment when American art was still full of promise, when the goings-on in the cold-water lofts of Lower Manhattan were not yet part of any canon. “She’s a young artist in many ways.”