Angels at the window

rach:

Eva Hesse, Contingent.

And her artist statement, which I get more out of each time I read it:

I would like the work to be non-work. This means that it would find its way beyond my preconceptions.

What I want of my art I can eventually find. The work must go beyond this.

It is my main concern to go beyond what I know and what I can know.

The formal principles are understandable and understood.

It is the unknown quantity from which and where I want to go.

As a thing, an object, it accedes to its non-logical self.

In its simplistic stand it achieves its own identity.

It is something, it is nothing.

I think Eva is one of those artists that is so greatly missed because she was so undoubtably a woman—her materials were fine and her touch on them finer; these were big installations made by small hands. They could break easily, and yet looking into their construction, they looked made to be continuous, interminable. The fact that her body gave up on her when she was so young is still unfair, but also a confirmation of what her work seemed to say: we are all brittle while we are brass-bound, here and not here, formally understandable yet heading towards the new.