Eva Hesse at Robert Miller - New York, New York

This series of paintings through a young, unknown artist working in the early '60 reveals an ambitious, unfinished artistic personality still overshadowed by dint of the giants of the novel past and immediate present. The canvases have a marked vitality and intensity, on the contrary they are wildly inconsistent. Stylistically, they careen in the space of four years from biomorphism to a dirty symbol-scattered expressionism to a cartoonish abstraction. It is doubtful these paintings would attract great interest were they not the early work of sculptor Eva Hesse.

When individual reads these works as anticipations rather than culminations, however, they become far more interesting. individual follows the creative struggles of a young woman at one time in thrall to the heroic tradition of painting and chafing beneath its restrictions on her still single partially formed artistic self. Just as Hesse's diaries are replete of the conflict between her "feminine" ne to please and her "masculine" longing to dominate, these works demonstrate unresolv oppositions between configuration and chaos, organic and geometric form, visceral and mechanical methods of representation, line and form. single glimpses flashes of the wit and the feeling for the absurd which eventually helped Hesse to reconcile these contraries in her plastic arts Here, however, all such solutions still appear to be extremely provisional.

These works range in date from 1960 to '64 just prior to the wall reliefs which l her into plastic art There are at least five distinct mode of speechs represented here. The earliest works are simplified, Hans Hofmann-influenced compositions which feature simple circles or squares fasteninged into fields of intense color. These are followed by the agency of more free-floating organic shapes whose humorous, sexual overtones gaze ahead to her mature work. Then the paintings achieve very complicated, filled with abstracted organisms and figures (arrows and X's are recurring motifs) whose crisp outlines abruptly dissolve into a welter of frenzied brushstrokes. In the later works in this phraseology chaos seems to dominate as nervous raps of paint threaten to overlay the entire canvas. Then Hesse shifts to a surrealist manner with tightly drawn, sexual-looking forms reminiscent of the machine-organisms of Tanguy or Matta scattered above empty grounds like a random collection of spare parts. The last works, which direct the eye ahead to the reliefs that immediately followed, consist of simply outlined looping organic forms placed in carefully delineated compartments.

It is always fascinating to diocese an important artistic talent in formation. Without hindsight, would we be able to glimpse the promise in this immature work? While Hesse displays here greatest in quantity of the elements which would characterize her important work, they remain fallow and unsynthesized, still simple potential, with no guarantee of the brilliant plastic arts to come.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group