During her short career Eva Hesse explored the expressive, often eccentric possibilities of rigorous, reductive abstraction. She considered Hang Up to be her first significant work of art—the first to achieve the level of “absurdity or extreme feeling” she was seeking.
In the late I960s, at a moment when sculpture was supplanting painting as the avant-garde medium of choice, Hang Up emphasizes painting’s most marginal feature, its frame. The frame here is sensitively painted but surrounds only blank wall. Instead it sprouts a generous loop of cord that protrudes at once gracefully and aggressively into the gallery space. Like a body, this strand of industrial tubing even succumbs to gravity, touching the floor.
Date
Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.
Robert Pincus–Witten and Linda Shearer, Eva Hesse: A Memorial Exhibition, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1972), n.p., cat. 8 (color ill.).
Lucy R. Lippard, Strata: Nancy Graves, Eva Hesse, Michelle Stuart, Jackie Winsor, exh. cat. (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1977), 10, 13 (color ill.), 15, 29.
Nicholas Serota, Eva Hesse: Sculpture, exh. cat. (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1979), cat. 7 (ill.).
Olle Granath and Margareta Helleberg, Flykpunkter/Vanishing Points, exh. cat. (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1984), 126 (ill.), 127.
Richard Armstrong and Richard Marshall, Entre la geometría y el gesto: escultura norteamericana, 1965-1975, exh. cat. (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, Direccion General de Bellas Artes y Archivos, Centro Nacional de Exposiciones, 1986), 30, pl. 66.1 (ill.).
Larry Silver, Art in History (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993), 450, fig. 10.25 (ill.).
Frances K. Pohl, Framing America: A Social History of American Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 462 (ill.).
Cornelia Butler, and others, Lisa Gabrielle Mark, ed., WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 54 (color ill.), 245, 503.
Lucy R. Lippard, Veronica Roberts, and Kirsten Swenson, Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt, exh. cat. (New Haven: Blanton Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2014), 60 (color ill.).
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Eva Hesse: A Memorial Exhibition, Dec. 8, 1972–Feb. 11, 1973, cat. 8; Buffalo, NY, Albright–Knox Gallery Mar. 6–Apr. 22, 1973; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, May 19–July 8, 1973; Pasadena, CA, Pasadena Art Museum Sept. 18–Nov. 11, 1973; Berkeley, CA: University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, until Feb. 3, 1974.
Vancouver, Vancouver Art Gallery, Nancy Graves, Eva Hesse, Michelle Stuart, Jackie Winsor, Oct. 9–Nov. 6, 1977, no cat. no.
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Eva Hesse: Sculpture, May 4–June 17, 1979, cat. 7; Otterlo, NL, Rijksmuseum Kröller–Müller, June 30–Aug. 5, 1979; Hannover, Kestner–Gesellschaft, Aug. 17–Sept. 23, 1979.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, Mar. 4–July 16, 2007, no cat. no.; Washington D.C., National Museum of Women in the Arts, Sept. 21–Dec. 16, 2007; Long Island City, NY, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Feb.17–May 12, 2008, Vancouver Art Gallery, Oct. 4, 2008–Jan. 11, 2009.
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