MoMA to Open First Major Eva Hesse Museum Show in Two Decades

The Museum of Modern Art in New York will stage "Eva Hesse: Wild Space, 1957–1970," the first major museum exhibition dedicated to the German-American artist since 2002. The show runs from May 30 to September 25, 2027, and brings together more than 150 works that reframe Hesse's experimental practice.

Lanka Tattersall, a curator in MoMA's prints and drawings department, organizes the exhibition. It foregrounds Hesse's drawing practice and how it informed her canonical sculptures and paintings. The last major museum presentation of her work was the 2002 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

"My sense is that there are generations of artists in New York City and beyond who may have read about Hesse's work, or seen a sculpture here or there, but haven't had a chance to think about the cross-pollination between her works on paper and her sculptures," Tattersall says. "Her approach to experimental freedom can encourage future generations of artists to experiment with their materials, with their forms, and to grapple with the question of what it means to be an artist in society."

Hesse was born in Hamburg in 1936 to Jewish parents and fled the Nazi regime with her family in 1938, settling in New York City. She completed a certificate for fine art at Cooper Union in 1957 and graduated from Yale University in 1959, where she studied under Josef Albers and Rico Lebrun and began developing her approach to abstract forms and color.

Hesse resisted fixed categories for her work. She once said her drawings and sculptures could be called paintings, and that some of her work could be called "nothing." She described her early works on paper as having a "wild space" and as being "not constant, [but] fluctuating."

The exhibition features a selection of these early works, including an untitled 1957 etching from MoMA's collection that is among the few prints Hesse made in her lifetime. It also includes pieces from the following decade, when Hesse immersed herself in the 1960s downtown New York art scene and the emerging Minimalist movement, and drawing remained a guiding force for her sculpture as she experimented with unconventional materials like latex and fiberglass.

In 1964, Hesse returned to Germany for the first time since childhood, accompanying her husband, the sculptor Tom Doyle, to an artist residency supported by the German industrialist Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt. Working in a defunct textile factory in Kettwig an der Ruhr, Hesse began using discarded cord to create reliefs that fuse bodily and mechanical forms. Among them is Ringaround Arosie (1965), a work of stacked circular forms with a sensual, organic quality that Hesse described as reminiscent of a "breast and penis."

Hesse displayed that work and a collection of breakthrough reliefs in a 1965 exhibition held inside a greenhouse on the Scheidt family's property, alongside several works on paper. The MoMA show will, for the first time, provide a dedicated focus on that exhibition, reuniting the reliefs and drawings to explore how Hesse's works on paper expanded three-dimensionally and how she fused machinelike imagery with organic shapes into hybrid configurations. This section will include a film showing Hesse engaging with visitors at the opening.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Contingent (1969), completed shortly before Hesse's death from a brain tumor at 34. The work appeared on the cover of Artforum that month. Composed of eight monumental sheetlike panels of fiberglass, resin, and latex-covered cheesecloth suspended from the ceiling, some curving onto the floor, it is on loan from the National Gallery of Australia and has not been shown in New York City since the 1970s.

"She herself thought about Contingent as being a boundary-straddling work that feels both like painting and a sculpture," Tattersall says. "She used different media to create something that she certainly had not seen in her lifetime, and that many of us will be seeing for the first time ourselves. It has the lightness and translucency that you see in some of her drawings."

Additional loans come from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and several private collections.

"Hesse is one of the artists who helped us both see a category clearly and also understand how to remake or rethink or even undo certain aesthetic categories," Tattersall adds. "I hope that people will see that there was a lot of free experimentation, a lot of wildness in the work, and also take that as a model for themselves."