The legacy of Eva

Published on Monday 3 August 2009 19:32

EVA HESSE'S career as an artist lasted only ten years but she continues to send ripples through the art world.

She died in 1970 aged only 34, but the woman whose personal story was as remarkable as her sculptures is still influencing artists today

On the cusp of recognition when she died in 1970, aged 34, from a brain tumour, she is now listed among the major names of post-war art.

Her remarkable sculptures, made from materials such as latex, fibreglass, wax and cheesecloth, are often understood as a response to her traumatic life: escape from the Nazis as a child, her mother's suicide when she ten, a broken marriage, the early death of her father. But art historians are also keen to emphasise her ground-breaking role in sculpture, minimalism and the birth of conceptual art.

Most remarkable is that many of her works continue to feel highly contemporary. Art students are frequently drawn to her. Her influence can be seen in artists as different as Rachel Whiteread, Claire Barclay, Karla Black and Thomas Hirschhorn. As a rare show of her work is unveiled at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, artists, teachers, curators and Hesse's sister talk about her enduring legacy.

HELEN HESSE CHARASH, Eva Hesse's sister

People always ask me, 'What was it like to live with a genius?' She was an ordinary child! We fought, we played dolls, we played in the park, life was very normal. It's just that what happened to our family made it different.

Eva was not yet three when our parents put us on a train without them (out of Nazi Germany]. She had issues of abandonment. My father was an attorney in Europe, we were people of means, and here (in the United States] we struggled. My parents got divorced in the States, and my mother committed suicide – there's no question that's traumatic.

We did have these traumatic events, but we also had good times in between. I can't stand when Eva is described as being pitiful or depressed. She did have heavy moments, but she liked to have fun. She was beautiful and adorable. It was the 1960s in New York, it was a very exciting time, her friends were all the big names.

I was married with two babies. We lived in Long Island. When she took sick, she stayed with me. Her first surgery was deemed to be a major success for a short time, so she thought she was on the road. She did the most fantastic work in those 15 months. She had a major show on Fifth Avenue as she was dying. Her work was on the cover of Art Forum in May 1970. We pasted the cover across from her bed and somehow she was able to say, "That's me".

My enduring memories of her are her capacity for having fun and being very passionate about her art. She was a genius, she was ahead of her time, she had vision, she had passion, she had the capability, she had the talent and she was a risk taker. Insecure as she was about many things in her life, she felt secure as an artist.

Art-world people always say the work looks fresh and new and current. Everywhere I go, young artists say that she's an important influence on their work. The question today is what would she have accomplished (had she lived], given what's happened to contemporary art? She would have gone in a million directions.

BRIONY FER, curator, Eva Hesse: Studiowork

Alongside artists like Andy Warhol and Donald Judd, Eva Hesse is established as one of the major players within the redefining of sculpture: the way she worked with materials and processes, making sculptures which figure the body without depicting the body.

As time has gone on, her range and her importance in this very intense body of work, the way it speaks to artists still, has become more and more apparent. I was keen to work with the Fruitmarket because they are a major public space that shows contemporary art – I think that conversation will become very clear.

In the context of some of the larger pieces, we will show a large selection of small pieces, work previously called "test pieces", "small works", "models", some of which have never been shown before. I have renamed them "studiowork". My feeling about this body of work is that it throws down a gauntlet to us because it is unclear precisely what they are.

Some of them could be small technical experiments, but few of them are. They're halfway between finished pieces and preparatory pieces – they're models that maybe become works over time; they change what they are. That seems to me to say something about art in general, and it also sets up powerful resonances with artists today.

I really want to separate the work and its importance from her life. Yes, she did have a tragic life, she had an extraordinary life. She is a bit like Sylvia Plath: although Hesse does not commit suicide, there is this way in which she is always being dragged back into a kind of biographical account.

That especially troubles the fate of women artists. It really gets in the way of thinking about her importance as an innovative sculptor.

CLAIRE BARCLAY, artist

I first encountered Hesse's work when I was a student. I remember thinking how extraordinary the sculptures were.

A lot of students were inspired by her work at that stage across a lot of different disciplines: sculpture, painting, textiles, environmental art, ceramics. Something about the pared-down nature of looking at things like form really appealed to a wide range of different practices.

It offered people the encouragement to play around with materials, to see what limits things could be stretched to. Some of the writing that I noted down in my sketchbooks at the time, things about absurdity and trying to find your own personal approach to the way that you work, the balance of order and chaos, is still quite relevant to what I do now.

I don't look at her work (for inspiration] now, but there is still something important for me in compositional element of her work, in terms of how something occupies space, how to create different viewpoints, an element of surprise when you're negotiating the work.

SAM AINSLEY, former head of MFA programme, Glasgow School of Art

When I was studying art in the 1970s, I found great difficulty finding contemporary woman artists whose work I admired. Hesse became a huge role model for me, and a generation of artists – especially women but men as well.

The first time I went to New York, I saw Hesse's work in the Guggenheim and was blown away. I thought it was fantastic. It just seemed to me so different from all the art I was seeing at the time. It felt contemporary, it felt strong, I could stand and look at it for a long time.

There was something quite beautiful about the symmetry, even in the most apparently tangled work, which is deeply attractive to human beings. It was very subtle, very minimal, not at all theatrical, there was a quiet beauty about it.

SARA BARKER, artist

Eva Hesse was important to me from first year at art school. I saw her show at Tate Modern in 2003 when I was still a student. I remember her ideas about getting a feeling from a work, that the key thing is what the work does, not what it is about.

That was a really important principle that saw me through art school, in understanding how I could make work and how I wanted to make work. The way she used materials has felt quite liberating, this idea of the art work not necessarily having to last. I don't suppose I ever intend for the work to disintegrate, but I want it to connect with something frail and something that feels human.

I suppose in terms of her relationship to materials, it's difficult when you're influenced by Eva Hesse not to be so influenced you want to use those same materials and end up making things which are similar. (For that reason] I don't look at her work that much, but I still I read about her.

DEAN HUGHES, head of intermedia at Edinburgh College of Art

Eva Hesse was important for me when I was at art college, particularly because I studied painting but didn't make any paintings; at the same time, my work wasn't sculpture. Her work seems to defy the idea of separate disciplines, which has a contemporary feel.

Students are certainly drawn to her. She's part of a group of artists who were very much associated with ideas. She was a very good writer and at the same time her work was really visceral and hands-on. She used new media, new materials, which are difficult, startling, exciting. It's also absurd, in a positive way.

&#149 Eva Hesse: Studiowork is at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh from tomorrow until 25 October