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Eva Hesse, Ennead, m/m, 36" x 22" x 1 1/2", 1966.

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Eva Hesse, Untitled, wash drawing, 12" x 9", 1966.

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Eva Hesse, Ishtar, m/m, 36" x 7 1/2" x 2 1/2", 1965.

a well-known woman artist, one might imagine that Hesse's work was cued in some measure by Marisol's work. Yet, a visit to Marisol's studio is recorded in the April 1966 notebook and the entry makes it clear that while Hesse was struck by the openness of Marisol's attitude regarding the use of odd substances, she had strong reservations as well. "Marisol does all work herself. She will try anything, experiment with any medium, incorporating all things." Here the sense of community ends and Hesse sharply notes that "What she does do though is leave too much on the surface - design, decoration. Mystery is lost. She cannot any longer just attach dime store paraphernalia all over, over everywhere - it's there and it's no longer even humorous; because one can expect it and there it is, a ring, a necklace, a shoe, a glass, a mirror, a piece of lace,... when her pieces hide something from the viewer we look at [them] differently."

The biomorphic frame of reference in Post-Minimalism generally had, of course, been discussed since the emergence of Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures, especially those of c. 1962-64, when Hesse herself was first being drawn to this historical relationship that Hesse emerged in the important "Eccentric Abstraction" exhibition which was organized for the Fischbach Gallery by one of Eva Hesse's close friends, the critic and theorist Lucy Lippard. It was at this time that Hesse came to know Donald Droll who

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was then the director of the gallery. 7

The "Eccentric Abstraction" exhibition, held in September and October of 1966, is one of the most influential group exhibitions in recent history. Lucy Lippard's selection was arresting in many ways. In addition to Eva Hesse, there was Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois - the inclusion of women is noteworthy - as well as Gary Kuehn, Bruce Nauman, Don Potts, Keith Sonnier, and, as a reminder of the less prepossessing "Abstract Inflationists and Eccentric Expressionists" exhibition, Frank Lincoln Viner. 8

Lippard viewed her exhibition as antiethical to "...the solid formal basis demanded of the best in current non-objective art." Importantly, she emphasized the "indirect affinities with the incongruity and often sexual content of Surrealism." Post-Minimal sensibility was described by Lippard as "an aspect of visceral identification that is hard to escape, an identification that psychologists have called 'body ego'" - an early example of alert critical opinion pressing for an art experienced in viscerally empathetic terms. Lippard noted of Hesse's work that "intricately controlled and tight-bound, paradoxically bulbous forms do not move but their effect is [also] both fixed and changeable. The finality of their black to gray gradation is countered by an unexpected unfixed space and the mood is both strong and vulnerable, tentative and expansive." Lippard presaged, that "The future of sculpture may well lie in such non-sculptural styles." What was a "non-sculptural" possibility in 1966 has 

clearly become a sculptural actuality.

The Lippard broadside came wrapped in a separate sheet of stippled vinyl, the particulars of date and location printed on one face, the other flecked with specks of silver and gold. The vulgarity of substance - a Warhol film of this date is called Vinyl - and low taste of the mailer, alluded, as Lippard said of Louise Bourgeois, to the "uneasy, near repellent side of art."

An underground was coalescing and emerging. The then unfashionable loft area south of Houston Street - hence SoHo, bordered on the East with the Bowery, where Eva Hesse had her studio - was discovered to be the new bohemia. Eva Hesse's life changed from agony and fear into a life central to a vital movement. She was valued as never before by artists, colleagues, and friends. She had found an important gallery to represent her work - the Fischbach Gallery - although she noted in her journal that she had hoped to be shown at the Dwan Gallery at which Sol LeWitt was represented, despite the fact that the astringent severity of the general character of the Dwan roster was foreign to the tendencies exploited by Hesse. Perhaps, too, Hesse still wanted to demonstrate to Tom Doyle, who had been shown at the Dwan Gallery, that she could now stand independently of him, but on his own turf so to speak. Other dealers became interested. "Mike Steiner brought Klaus Kertess here," she wrote. "He will open a new art gallery in the Fall. He looked hard at work