Eva Hesse (October Files)

A critical primer on the work of artist Eva Hesse.

Eva Hesse's distinctive process-based art exerted a powerful influence on minimalist artists of the 1960s and continues to inspire artists today. Using industrial materials such as latex and fiberglass, she exploited their flexibility to produce works with an unsettling psychic and corporeal resonance. Hesse, who was born in Germany in 1936 and raised in New York City, died of cancer in New York in 1970. Eva Hesse focuses on the body of criticism that has developed since the last major retrospective of Hesse's work, at the Yale University Art Gallery in 1992. The book's publication coincides with a major exhibition organized jointly by the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Wiesbaden Museum. Eva Hesse contains a 1970 interview by Cindy Nemser, a discussion between Mel Bochner and Joan Simon, and essays by Briony Fer, Rosalind Krauss, Mignon Nixon, and Anne M. Wagner.

Mignon Nixon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at University College London and an editor of October magazine. She is the author of Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art and the editor of a previous October Files volume, Eva Hesse (both published by the MIT Press).