About this artwork
Trained as a painter, by the late 1960s Eva Hesse had become widely known for influential experiments in Post-Minimalist sculpture—a mode of abstract art making that emphasized process and a kind of bodily irregularity or eccentricity. Hesse created Untitled when she was only 24, and as such it represents a key early work in her career.
This vivid canvas, with its active, gestural strokes, marks Hesse’s emergence at a moment when Abstract Expressionist painting was still dominant. Around this time she was painting abstracted portraits, and the central orange shape here almost appears like a head in profile. Above all, however, the work’s insistent, dripping slashes of paint and its idiosyncratic palette indicate an artist already guided by an interest in materiality, intimacy, and absurdity.
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Status
- On View, Gallery 291
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Department
- Contemporary Art
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Artist
- Eva Hesse
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Title
- Untitled
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Place
- United States (Artist's nationality:)
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Date
- 1960
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Medium
- Oil on canvas
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Dimensions
- 91.4 × 91.4 cm (36 × 36 in.)
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Credit Line
- Gift of Helen Charash
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Reference Number
- 1989.534
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Copyright
- © The Estate of Eva Hesse, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.