Symposium: Eva Hesse ‘Looking Back at a Voice for the Future’

'Although Hesse did not consider herself a feminist—‘excellence has no sex,’ she famously wrote in a letter to the feminist art historian and critic Cindy Nemser —she was seen as crucial to the women who followed. At a time when it was especially difficult for young women artists to achieve an aesthetic separate from their male peers, she was a role model. Hesse’s courage in the then largely male-dominated art world gave them permission to follow their own instincts, to take what they needed from the art world and transform it.’

— Helen Cooper, ‘Looking Back at a Voice for the Future,’ in ‘Eva Hesse: Exhibitions, 1972–2022’ from Hauser & Wirth Publishers.