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Lot Essay
"Fresh out of Yale in 1959, Hesse was concerned that painting was the only viable path to artistic success, and she struggled to find her painterly voice. Despite the positive reception of her drawings, Hesse turned her attention to painting, and focused her energies on harnessing oil and canvas. "Must paint soon, drawing not enough," she wrote in 1960. "Only painting can now see me through and I must see it throughIt is [the] source of my goals, ambitions and satisfactions ." (H. A. Cooper, ed., Eva Hesse: Retrospective, New Haven and London, 1992, p. 22). The canvases from 1960-61 demonstrate what fraught terrain painting was for Hesse, for they illustrate both its pleasures and hazards. Their worked-over surfaces are laden with strokes and drips, suggestion deliberate, intense labor.
Hesse was keenly interested in the grotesque and abject-Linda Norden writes about it as the "ick" of her work. (L. Norden, "Getting to 'Ick': To Know What One is Not," in H. A. Cooper, ed., Eva Hesse: Retrospective, New Haven and London, 1992, p. 70, no. 1). Which is not to say that they lack levity. The humor in the paintings is perverse, as Hesse took delight in mutating what should be precious. Thus a bow in the hair becomes a kind of parasite lodged on the temple, feeding on a wide plane of forehead. Some figures groan under the weight of heavy hats and stiff helmets of hair. The paintings depict faces undergoing transformation: eyes bulge out or droop and slide precariously down an expanse of cheek. Narrow noses are shunted to the side and heads flatten or swell.
Most of these paintings are untitled. A few, however, have been identified as self-portraits. But if they are all images of self-regard, they are duplicitous, for their murky color yields no clear insights about the artist aside from a sense that she is seriously grappling with the process and paint. Pea green and mustard clot into truncated bodies and overripe heads. They show an economy of gesture, a limited palette of forms; as Anne Wagner writes, "These are faces and bodies made up of parts: blocky units, small geometries that do their duty as eyes or nose or mouth or brow." (A. M. Wagner, Three Artists, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996, p. 195-96)."
(J. Bryan-Wilson, Eva Hesse: Painting the Self, exh. cat., New Haven and London, 2002, 112).
Hesse was keenly interested in the grotesque and abject-Linda Norden writes about it as the "ick" of her work. (L. Norden, "Getting to 'Ick': To Know What One is Not," in H. A. Cooper, ed., Eva Hesse: Retrospective, New Haven and London, 1992, p. 70, no. 1). Which is not to say that they lack levity. The humor in the paintings is perverse, as Hesse took delight in mutating what should be precious. Thus a bow in the hair becomes a kind of parasite lodged on the temple, feeding on a wide plane of forehead. Some figures groan under the weight of heavy hats and stiff helmets of hair. The paintings depict faces undergoing transformation: eyes bulge out or droop and slide precariously down an expanse of cheek. Narrow noses are shunted to the side and heads flatten or swell.
Most of these paintings are untitled. A few, however, have been identified as self-portraits. But if they are all images of self-regard, they are duplicitous, for their murky color yields no clear insights about the artist aside from a sense that she is seriously grappling with the process and paint. Pea green and mustard clot into truncated bodies and overripe heads. They show an economy of gesture, a limited palette of forms; as Anne Wagner writes, "These are faces and bodies made up of parts: blocky units, small geometries that do their duty as eyes or nose or mouth or brow." (A. M. Wagner, Three Artists, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996, p. 195-96)."
(J. Bryan-Wilson, Eva Hesse: Painting the Self, exh. cat., New Haven and London, 2002, 112).