MoMA to Stage Eva Hesse’s First Major Museum Exhibition in Two Decades

The late German-American artist Eva Hesse, best-known for her works that challenged the conventions of Minimalism, will have a career-spanning exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York next year that foregrounds her drawing practice and how it informed her canonical sculptures and paintings. The show “Eva Hesse: Wild Space, 1957-1970,” on view from May 30–September 25, 2027, will bring together more than 150 works that reframe Hesse’s experimental practice.

The exhibition is organized by Lanka Tattersall, a curator in MoMA’s prints and drawings department, and marks the first major museum presentation dedicated to the artist since 2002, when the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of her work. In addition to reconsidering the role of drawing within her broader practice, the show aims to open Hesse’s work to viewers who may not have encountered the full breadth of her output, according to Tattersall.

“My sense is that there are generations of artists in New York City and beyond who may have read about Hesse’s work, or seen a sculpture here or there, but haven’t had a chance to think about the cross-pollination between her works on paper and her sculptures,” Tattersall says. “Her approach to experimental freedom can encourage future generations of artists to experiment with their materials, with their forms, and to grapple with the question of what it means to be an artist in society.”

Hesse was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936 to Jewish parents and fled the Nazi regime with her family in 1938, settling in New York City. After completing a certificate for fine art at Cooper Union in 1957, Hesse graduated from Yale University in 1959, where she studied under Josef Albers and Rico Lebrun and began developing her approach to abstract forms and color.

Hesse famously resisted fixed categories for her work, once saying that her drawings and sculptures could be called paintings and that some of her work could be called “nothing.” She described her early works on paper as having a “wild space,” and as being “not constant, [but] fluctuating”.

The show features a selection of these early works, including an untitled 1957 etching from MoMA’s collection that is among the few prints Hesse made in her lifetime, alongside pieces made in the decade after, when she became immersed in the 1960s downtown New York art scene and the emerging Minimalist movement. Drawing remained a guiding force for her sculptural work during this time, when Hesse was increasingly experimenting with unconventional materials like latex and fiberglass.

In 1964, Hesse returned to Germany for the first time since childhood. She accompanied her husband, the sculptor Tom Doyle, to an artist residency supported by the German industrialist Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt. Working in a defunct textile factory in Kettwig an der Ruhr, Hesse began using discarded cord to create a series of reliefs that are notable for fusing bodily and mechanical forms, including Ringaround Arosie (1965), a work made of stacked circular forms that have a sensual and organic quality and that Hesse described as reminiscent of a “breast and penis.”

Hesse displayed this work and a collection of breakthrough reliefs in an exhibition held inside a greenhouse on the Scheidt family’s property in 1965, alongside several works on paper. The MoMA exhibition will, for the first time, provide a dedicated focus on the show, reuniting the reliefs and drawings to explore how Hesse’s works on paper expanded three-dimensionally and how she fused machinelike imagery with organic shapes, creating hybrid configurations. This section will also include a film showing Hesse engaging with visitors at the opening.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Contingent (1969). The work was completed shortly before Hesse’s death from a brain tumor at 34 years old and was published on the cover of Artforum that month. One of Hesse’s emblematic works, it is composed of eight monumental sheetlike panels of fiberglass, resin, and latex-covered cheesecloth, which are suspended from the ceiling and some of which curve onto the floor.

“She herself thought about Contingent as being a boundary-straddling work that feels both like painting and a sculpture,” Tattersall says. “She used different media to create something that she certainly had not seen in her lifetime, and that many of us will be seeing for the first time ourselves. It has the lightness and translucency that you see in some of her drawings.”

The sculpture is on loan from the National Gallery of Australia and has not been shown in New York City since the 1970s. Other key loans for the show are coming from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and several private collections.

“Hesse is one of the artists who helped us both see a category clearly and also understand how to remake or rethink or even undo certain aesthetic categories,” Tattersall adds. “I hope that people will see that there was a lot of free experimentation, a lot of wildness in the work, and also take that as a model for themselves.”