No title 1958

Artist: Oh, this little dreamscape. It just feels... unresolved, doesn't it? There's a palpable sense of searching, a quiet, introspective mood. Art Historian: It does evoke a kind of searching. It makes me think of classical landscapes, turned inside out. The forms are there – the hills, the sky – but rendered as raw, almost primal marks. This "Untitled" graphite and pencil drawing dates from 1958, by Eva Hesse. Artist: "Raw" is such a good word for it. Like the earth before things take shape. Did she do many landscapes, I wonder? Art Historian: It’s not what she is known for. More like she reduced a familiar iconography, a landscape, down to its essence – or perhaps its potential. These scratchy marks…they become a kind of visual code. What landscape imagery resonates within you? What places are sacred in your personal landscape of memories? Artist: Sacred...that hits the nail on the head. Though it's dark and chaotic, there is also this… longing. Maybe it represents childhood, or a home left behind, filled with sensory input – the wind, the damp earth. Art Historian: I agree, a very strong evocation of childhood experience, something pre-verbal and sensed viscerally. You have forms rising up almost like figures. Everything’s connected. In psychoanalytic terms it recalls that early infant perception of a totally interconnected universe. Artist: It is! Like a hazy memory resurfacing... The absence of color almost amplifies the rawness. Did the artist ever discuss the drawing or explain the mark-making that she was developing at that time? Art Historian: I don’t have direct insight from the artist in this case. Although her career trajectory led her to the sculptural forms for which she’s best known. So I wonder, were these exploratory pencil marks formative, precursors of something bigger for the artist? A visual meditation as she developed her mature abstract style. Artist: Well, that gives me a little something to mull over. And to dream on... it is really very powerful. Art Historian: Me too. Hesse’s "Untitled" truly showcases the profound power of suggestion embedded in symbols and marks and how those things connect us to the collective past.