Eva Hesse: Emergent Self-Portrait

The artist Eva Hesse (1936–1970) and her work, ranging from traditional painting and drawing to highly inventive bas-relief and sculptural form, are frequently interpreted through the lenses of biography, psychology, and gender, contributing to a prevailing narrative of a troubled and tragic artist figure. This dominant understanding of Hesse’s oeuvre has largely emerged from the interpretation of the artist’s own words, in the form of diary entries and interviews, and the published interpretations of these texts by scholars, peers, and critics, who frequently dwell on the narrative of Hesse’s short and challenging life. However, a closer look at the documentation of the artist’s own process of making, one that combined a near-daily writing practice, close annotations of choices made and executed in her work, and her emphasis on material experimentation, reveals an alternative reading of her writing and work. This paper will first explore the origins of the existing scholarship dedicated to Hesse’s writing that has contributed to the gendered and tragic mythos surrounding the artist and her work. This paper will then provide a re-reading of Hesse’s practice through the example of the work Repetition Nineteen, demonstrating her textual and material process as a deeply entangled set of relations between artist, process, and material contributing to a still-emerging portrait of the artist and her contributions.