The Brooklyn Rail

In the header image of Hauser & Wirth’s web page for its current Eva Hesse show, Hesse stands in front of Expanded Expansion (1969). The wall-sized draped sculpture gleams ivory behind the artist, and the latex-coated cheesecloth curving around its upright fiberglass poles seems almost to sparkle as light catches in the cloth’s niches. Though the sculpture’s dimensions are variable—because the fabric could be pulled taut or allowed to sway—the title suggests that this, here, is precisely how we are meant to see it. If an expansion is “a thing formed by the enlargement of something,” then its extent is the very thing expanded. Noun follows adjective in a tautology of logic and action that is both a little silly if we think about it too much and definitive if we take the words at their word: the expansion is expanded, in the past. It is done, even if only just done.

If we compare that image to the Expanded Expansion available to us now, it becomes clear how much has changed for this and indeed most of Hesse’s sculptures. What was once light and supple has hardened, cracked, deepened. I’m not entirely sure how much the drapes could expand or contract without causing fairly serious damage to the work. The bright creaminess of what was the newly completed sculpture has darkened to a warm sepia, almost as if it were an aged photograph of the thing in addition to the thing itself. The expansion is expanded, in the past. It is done.

But it is not finished. Five Sculptures, curated by Briony Fer, one of the foremost scholars of Hesse’s oeuvre, offers these works to commune with one another again and we with them. It was my first glimpse of Area (1968), from the collection of the Wexner Center for the Arts, despite having lived in Columbus for a decade. Repetition Nineteen I (1967), on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, features eighteen cup-like forms covered in off-white paint and papier-mâché, a color undoubtedly close to how the rest of the sculptures might have appeared when they were first displayed. It is described with the poignant note that it was originally “19 units (one missing).” Or consider Aught (1968) and Augment (1968), which are installed—Aught’s latex-over-canvas panels hanging four abreast on the wall from grommets and Augment’s canvases spread on the floor in front of them like a deck of magician’s cards—as Robert Morris had included them in Nine at Leo Castelli, the famous “warehouse show” he curated at Castelli’s warehouse in 1968. Aught has aged in a way similar to Expanded Expansion in darkening and sagging—Fer has described this as a color gradation undertaken by time—but the centers of Augment remain light with their framing latex strips developing color. The frame on the seventh canvas from the right has burnished into a sanguine reddish-purple like raw meat, unlike anything I’ve seen in Hesse, the viscerality of her practice fully evident.

Any installation of Eva Hesse’s sculptural work is an event to be savored because these wonderful objects are so delicate that they may at some point be too fragile to display at all. By chance, Five Sculptures is up at the same time as the Metropolitan Museum’s costume exhibit Sleeping Beauties, which includes some items that are “far too fragile ever to be worn again;” many of these are presented flat within vitrines. One of the critiques of the Met’s exhibition is that, as remarkable as the garments are, they miss the body, breath, and life of their wearers, that clothes especially are meant to be worn, even as we wear them ragged. In viewing Hesse as we do, colorful where they were once pale, almost in the reverse of ancient sculptures which are now pale where they were originally bright, we mourn their past, but we also acknowledge and honor the life behind and within them, and we “love that well” before they leave again.