Eva Hesse 1965
The book’s essays describe an artist actively figuring things out: through the time and materials at hand in her makeshift studio; through Marcel Duchamp, Arshile Gorky, Robert Morris, Francis Picabia, and Jean Tinguely (some of the artists whose work she saw on exhibition visits); through her reading and through her extraordinary correspondence with Sol LeWitt, who encouraged her to direct her uncertainty into doing more: “more nonsensical more crazy more machines . . . make them abound with nonsense.” Most crucially—in the catalogue’s nearly one hundred illustrations—we see Hesse’s process of discovery: gouache drawings and collages whose detonating diagrams progressively fall into neatly gridded forms; delicate ink line renderings that resemble Dr. Seussian plumbing, utensils that might transform into rockets, and machines that appear to be assembled out of anatomy and architecture; and, finally, what Hesse called her “contraptions,” a series of fourteen vivid reliefs that extend the play of transparency, interiority, and absurd invention of her drawings into real space.  —Prudence Peiffer