Eva Hesse and What It Means to Be Post-Anything

Eva Hesse was an artist at the center of the Post-Minimalist art movement. There are many “Post-” art movements in the history of art, which simply is a way of describing art that expands upon some of the achievements of a previous art movement. Often artists within the same “Post-” movement, inspired by the same art, have different interests from one another.

Minimalist artists working in the late 60s, such as Donald Judd, focused on the specifics of industrial materials they used, often repeating forms to resist illusionism and representation.  Many times, they created art with mechanical modes of production as a way of denying authorship.

As a Post-Minimalist artist, Eva Hesse retained the repetition of forms, but made her works of art by hand with materials suggestive of a biological origin, reintroducing a human element to art that contrasted with the cool, intellectual aesthetic of Minimalist art. Her art elicits a visceral response which was highly subversive in the context of the cerebral 60s.