Untitled

Hesse was at the forefront of "eccentric abstraction," the name given in 1966 by critic Lucy Lippard to sculpture that used malleable and unconventional materials such as latex and fiberglass. Hesse's sculptures emphasize tactility and translucency in contrast to the hard geometries and industrial materials utilized by Minimalist artists at the time. Preceding her sculpture practice and continuing alongside it, Hesse created drawings that were, like her sculptures, serial explorations of ambiguous forms. She created this sheet early in her short career. It incorporates a series of frames ranging in tone from opaque black to the white of the page itself, surrounding a form that resembles a crudely drawn house. This work anticipates a series of window frame drawings that Hesse made in the final two years of her life, between 1968 and 1970. The interplay of opacity and translucency subverts the idea of a frame as a transparent aperture that one might simply look through.