Untitled

Trained as a painter, by the late 1960s Eva Hesse had become widely known for influential experiments in Post-Minimalist sculpture—a mode of abstract art making that emphasized process and a kind of bodily irregularity or eccentricity. Hesse created Untitled when she was only 24, and as such it represents a key early work in her career.

This vivid canvas, with its active, gestural strokes, marks Hesse's emergence at a moment when Abstract Expressionist painting was still dominant. Around this time she was painting abstracted portraits, and the central orange shape here almost appears like a head in profile. Above all, however, the work's insistent, dripping slashes of paint and its idiosyncratic palette indicate an artist already guided by an interest in materiality, intimacy, and absurdity.