Untitled 1964

Eva Hesse made this untitled painting, and it looks to me like she did it with ink and watercolor, or maybe gouache, on paper. What strikes me is how the painting is split in two by that emphatic black bar. It’s like she was thinking in terms of loose shapes, a yellow cloud up top, a green triangle below, with all these tiny, nervous figures and scribbles escaping from both. I can imagine her, leaning in, drawing, erasing, and then, wham, a big dark stripe to pull it all together. It’s so interesting, the conversation she’s having between the geometric and the organic, the bold color blocks and the fragile little characters. Hesse often worked with unconventional materials, blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, and you can really see that experimental spirit here. The longer I look, the more I think about other painters like Gorky or Guston, that whole lineage of artists who weren’t afraid to let their minds wander on the canvas.