Untitled

From the museum

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.

The museum’s own description, in English. Licence: CC BY 4.0