Hang Up

Eva Hesses Hang Up from 1966 is a wall-mounted construction consisting of a painted wooden frame wrapped in acrylic-painted cloth, from which a loop of cord covered in acrylic extends into the viewers space like a defiant gesture from the otherwise rectilinear object. The work marks a pivotal moment in Hesses brief career: the transition from the painted reliefs of her early period to the sculptural forms in fiberglass, latex, and rubber that would make her one of the most influential artists of the post-Minimalist generation. The rigid frame and the long cord that protrudes from it create a dialectic between order and disorder, geometry and organic form, the contained and the excessive, that would become the central tension of all of Hesses subsequent work. The title Hang Up operates in multiple registers: as a literal description of the works relationship to the wall, as a colloquial term for an emotional blockage or psychological fixation, and as an imperative to hang up the phone, to terminate communication. The painted cloth on the frame introduces the domestic, textile associations that would become increasingly prominent in Hesses work, while the cord covered in acrylic points forward to her use of rubber tubing and latex cord in the installations that followed. Created in 1966, the year before Hesse began working in fiberglass, Hang Up is both a summation of her early concerns and a prologue to the revolutionary sculptural practice that would unfold over the next four years before her death in 1970.

Hang Up is a pivotal work in the development of post-Minimalist sculpture, marking the moment when Hesse introduced the organic, the handmade, and the psychologically loaded into the hermetic vocabulary of Minimalism. Its influence on the development of process art, installation art, and feminist sculpture has been profound and ongoing.

A pivotal 1966 wall construction by Hesse that marks her transition from reliefs to sculptural form, combining a rigid painted frame with a defiantly protruding cord that introduces the dialectic of order and disorder, geometry and organic form that would define her revolutionary post-Minimalist practice.