Eve Hesse

Eve Hesse

The exhibit I went to see was entitled Eva Hesse Spectres 1960.   I had never seen any of Eva Hesse's work, read about her, or for that fact even heard about her before I visited the gallery.   Now having seen her art I believe this to be an unfortunate shortcoming of mine which I have remedied.   After seeing the exhibit I went on line and viewed much of her work mainly her sculptures which I found to be just as emotionally stimulating as her paintings.   However I don’t feel the images on my computer screen do her work justice although very interesting and emotion provoking I just did not get the same deep feeling as when I viewed the exhibit.    
    The exhibit was a collection of oil paintings that Hesse had painted in 1960 not one had a name, which I feel says a lot about the message she was trying to convoy,   but the exhibit is called spectres which the pan-flit that was handed out at the front desk says means an apparition or phantasm or ghostly being.   I did not read the pan-flit until I had gotten home and I am so glad I waited otherwise my experience and interpretation of Eva's art may have been tainted or otherwise influenced by others views.   I am also glad that I did not know that she was a sculptor at the time I viewed the exhibit “to be explained later”.  
    Although the excepted iconography of this set of painting is gloomy, and depressed my experience of the assemblage was different.   Aside from a few small, creepy paintings that where supposedly a depiction of some kind of obscure self portrait of Ms. Hesse I didn't feel there was very much gloomy darkness to the exhibit.   I did not get ghosts and specters out of my viewing of the exhibit I observed emotion.
    I found her paintings to be full of life with a kind of muted or hollow emotion that just begged to be filled with the emotion of the viewer.   The paintings just pulled me in made me feel like I could live in them, explore them, be a part of them for just a bit.   I thought that...