Title of Artwork: “Untitled”
Artwork by Eva Hesse
Year Created 1960
Summary of Untitled by Eva Hesse
At the age of 24, Eva Hesse was knowledgeable about recent art history topics like the New York School’s Abstract Expressionist ethos and its “second generation” response in the form of Colour Field painting. According to curator E. Luanne McKinnon, she started out as an independent artist in 1960 and created a number of works that have since come to be known as “spectre pictures.” These expressionistic abstractions share a flirtatious relationship with body and self-portrait imagery while attempting to convey something relatively ethereal, a recurring psychological motif like a state of mind, a mood, or a memory.
All About Untitled by Eva Hesse
Although one might not immediately notice it, Hesse alludes to the typical format of a studio-based self-portrait by the painter seated at her easel, which is exactly what Hesse is going for. Untitled, like many of the other pieces in this series, features a largely monochromatic palette of green pigment that is accented, or visually divided, by sharply contrasting tonalities that define the two-dimensional space of the canvas. Hesse’s exposure to Louise Nevelson’s work in the contemporaneous Sixteen Americans exhibition at MoMA may have had an impact on the compartmental imagery of Untitled, which will be repeated in Hesse’s sculpture, such as in the Repetition Nineteen pieces. While Hesse’s limited colour palette and compartmental leanings can be attributed to her study with Albers, the gestural brushwork in this piece comes from her training in the Abstract Expressionist movement. Everything she says reflects her desire to visual strip the subject down to its most basic elements.
