Eva Hesse, German-born, American sculptor, painter, and interdisciplinary visual artist, was perhaps most well known for her use of latex, plastics, and fiberglass in her artwork long before these materials were popular on the art scene. She also became an important artist historically, because of her position as a Jewish woman making art in the 1950's and 60's in America, who also was working in a very abstract to non-representational way, which art critics of the time may not have been expecting. What draws me most to Hesse's work, is her concern with the intellectual and philosophical aspects of creation. She says of her work, "When I work, it's only the abstract qualities that I'm working with, which is to say the material, the form it's going to take, the size, the scale, the positioning...for me it's a total image that has to do with me and life." Her works are aesthetically beautiful and brilliant, though not in a traditional way. The works make you question yourself and your ideas, asking you to look again, to come closer, to put words to what you see and to relate to them, and essentially Hesse, on a uniquely personal level. 

Hesse had a take on art making that I can easily relate to. Her materials were often found materials, whatever was lying around at the textile factory she worked at, and her process playful and imaginative. She also focused much on titles of her work, and often kept a thesaurus nearby to search out the right words and titles for her creations. In looking at her artworks, certain words come to mind, and the conversation and vocabulary that can emerge is as interesting as the pieces you are seeing themselves. Often Hesse would say things like she was trying to create 'non-art' and if something was too obviously beautiful, she would re-do it, as she did for her piece 'Repition Nineteen 3'. In my art I often find myself also searching for beauty that is not immediately eye catching, not blatantly obvious to viewers. I think Hesse wanted people to see her works and have to think about them, think about their own lives, and her life, and life in general and all it's eccentricities to actually see the beauty in her pieces. It takes a special kind of person to see beauty in the chaos, and I believe Hesse monopolized this idea in the works she made for the time period she lived in.     

Some of Hesse's works are ominous, some imposing and strange, some chaotic, and at the same time most are fragile and delicate. Experiencing her mother's death at age ten, being in a difficult place with her jewish heritage so close to the time of the holocaust, struggling to make it as a female artist in the 50's and 60's, going through divorce, and eventually learning to live with a fatal illness and dying from a brain tumor at age thirty four left Hesse with incredible insight to the fragility of life. Hesse's work  reminds us how something as vulnerable and at times tragic as human life, can be still eternally beautiful, and still, infinitely worth it.