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Lot Essay
Throughout Hesse's career, she explored the complex multi-faceted dialogue between painting, works on paper and sculpture. Mature, iconic works such as Contingent (1969), made shortly before her untimely death in 1970, reveal this negotiation between two- and three-dimensionality. It is hardly surprising then, that Hesse trained as a painter and that many of her early drawings, paintings and collages contain the ideas and processes that culminated in her mature work.
Intent on process and interested in manipulating her medium but also letting it act according to its own dynamic, Hesse collaborated with her material, relinquishing partial control. Finding painting too premeditated, she began to explore the "in-the-moment" aspect of collage in 1960. By 1962, she was mixing strips and pieces chaotically: pieces with scribbled pencil marks clashed with fragments painted with gouache and various inks, the intentions of one canceling out the other. These elements, worked on over a period of time, were relief-like and discontinuous. Barely coalescing, these works gained their strength from the tension of having come together vis a vis the latent potential for imminent change and disintegration. Featuring fluid and spontaneous marks and incisions in pencil and variously opaque and transparent washes in colored ink and gouache on both the collaged elements and their paper supports, these works comprised an intense and lively surface. Alternatively abstract and allusive, organic and geometric, cramped and airy, the various elements that comprised these works jostled for attention, never accommodating a single point of focus. Perhaps to render them some semblance of organization, Hesse began to cut or frame her images within delineated squares or rectangles and arrange these "boxed-in" pictures into rows or grids in 1963. This tendency to house bold, spontaneous output within irregular, hand drawn, geometric delineations would resurface in later sculptures that fused Minimalism with expressive form.
Created in 1964, at the height of her formal experimentation with works on paper, Untitled incorporates many of the techniques she developed within this medium. The drawing in the upper portion of the work features five cubes in perspective, arranged around a central cube whose frontal plane is colored bright orange. Within these cubes are ambiguous images that fluctuate between figuration and abstraction, narration and non-sequiturs. Their placement also suggests an ambiguity of space - it is impossible to see whether the images float within the cubic spaces or whether they sit on their front or back planes. Disjunctive with this semi-perspectival, semi-representational, painterly upper portion, the lower part of the work features collaged pieces of paper depicting flat geometric shapes and signs surrounding a central grayish white rectangle. Comprising colored squares, grids, circles and linear arrows, the vocabulary of this portion appears hieroglyphic, as if informed by some personal language or some arcane electrical circuit. While the central orange square in the upper portion mirrors the central grayish white rectangle of the lower portion, each proving a focus to otherwise disconnected images, the two parts occupy distinct realms. Characteristic of her works on paper, this aspect of Untitled adds an element of surprise and a chance that permeates the best examples of its kind. Relief-like in its incorporation of collage and chalky, tactile passages of gouache, Untitled begins to cross the boundary between two- and three-dimensions, a quality that Hesse would take to its conclusion in her sculptures within a year of its execution.
Intent on process and interested in manipulating her medium but also letting it act according to its own dynamic, Hesse collaborated with her material, relinquishing partial control. Finding painting too premeditated, she began to explore the "in-the-moment" aspect of collage in 1960. By 1962, she was mixing strips and pieces chaotically: pieces with scribbled pencil marks clashed with fragments painted with gouache and various inks, the intentions of one canceling out the other. These elements, worked on over a period of time, were relief-like and discontinuous. Barely coalescing, these works gained their strength from the tension of having come together vis a vis the latent potential for imminent change and disintegration. Featuring fluid and spontaneous marks and incisions in pencil and variously opaque and transparent washes in colored ink and gouache on both the collaged elements and their paper supports, these works comprised an intense and lively surface. Alternatively abstract and allusive, organic and geometric, cramped and airy, the various elements that comprised these works jostled for attention, never accommodating a single point of focus. Perhaps to render them some semblance of organization, Hesse began to cut or frame her images within delineated squares or rectangles and arrange these "boxed-in" pictures into rows or grids in 1963. This tendency to house bold, spontaneous output within irregular, hand drawn, geometric delineations would resurface in later sculptures that fused Minimalism with expressive form.
Created in 1964, at the height of her formal experimentation with works on paper, Untitled incorporates many of the techniques she developed within this medium. The drawing in the upper portion of the work features five cubes in perspective, arranged around a central cube whose frontal plane is colored bright orange. Within these cubes are ambiguous images that fluctuate between figuration and abstraction, narration and non-sequiturs. Their placement also suggests an ambiguity of space - it is impossible to see whether the images float within the cubic spaces or whether they sit on their front or back planes. Disjunctive with this semi-perspectival, semi-representational, painterly upper portion, the lower part of the work features collaged pieces of paper depicting flat geometric shapes and signs surrounding a central grayish white rectangle. Comprising colored squares, grids, circles and linear arrows, the vocabulary of this portion appears hieroglyphic, as if informed by some personal language or some arcane electrical circuit. While the central orange square in the upper portion mirrors the central grayish white rectangle of the lower portion, each proving a focus to otherwise disconnected images, the two parts occupy distinct realms. Characteristic of her works on paper, this aspect of Untitled adds an element of surprise and a chance that permeates the best examples of its kind. Relief-like in its incorporation of collage and chalky, tactile passages of gouache, Untitled begins to cross the boundary between two- and three-dimensions, a quality that Hesse would take to its conclusion in her sculptures within a year of its execution.