I’m not saying Eva Hesse wasn’t a great artist. Her unique mashup of Minimalism, Arte Povera, Surrealist Biomorphic Abstraction, Pop and Process Art brought humor and pathos to a field that was threatening to disappear up its own ass in a frenzy of high-serious math-geek reductivism, and has proved to be a powerful and positive influence on subsequent generations of object makers — if only for the adoption of the respirator as a standard art-making tool. Hesse died of brain cancer at 34 after half a decade of unmediated exploration in highly evaporative sculptural materials like fiberglass and resin. In the last five years of her brief life, almost clairvoyantly integrated into the burgeoning discourse-dominated mainstream art world, she produced more remarkable sculptural pieces than most sculptors manage in a lifetime — certainly enough to justify her position as a major contributor to the history of... More >>>