OBERLIN, OH.- Delayed for two years due to the pandemic—and after appearing at Museum Wiesbaden, Hauser & Wirth New York, and mumok in Vienna—the exhibition Forms Larger and Bolder: Eva Hesse Drawings returns to Northeast Ohio for its run at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, on the campus of Oberlin College. Featuring more than 70 works on paper, along with archival material and an important sculpture, the show runs through June 5, 2022.

Drawn entirely from the Allen’s collection, Forms Larger and Bolder illustrates the foundational role that drawing played throughout Hesse’s career. The Oberlin iteration is the most comprehensive of the tour, with the addition of materials from the Eva Hesse Archive (housed at the Allen), and the pioneering sculpture Laocoön (1966), which was one of the first museum acquisitions of a sculpture by Hesse when the Allen acquired it in 1970.

German-born American artist Eva Hesse (1936–1970) produced a prodigious body of work that collapsed disciplinary boundaries and forged inventive approaches to materials, forms, and processes. Although Hesse died far too young—of a brain tumor at age 34—her works are major touchstones of Postminimalism, informed and enriched by her friendships with New York artists Donald Judd, Mel Bochner, and Sol LeWitt, whose work she greatly influenced in turn.

Forms Larger and Bolder features a selection of Hesse’s earliest drawings, which chart the origins of her enduring engagement with the medium as a primary site for her experimentation with new ideas and processes. Also included are drawings from her first mature bodies of work, in the early 1960s; drawings she made in Germany in 1964–5, which include collages in an abstract expressionist mode—“wild space,” as Hesse called them in a letter to Sol LeWitt; so-called “machine drawings” from the same period; and a selection of working sketches and diagrams from 1967 to 1970 that shed light on some of her most significant sculptures.

Although Hesse’s career was centered in New York City, she visited Oberlin for two days in 1968 at the invitation of Ellen Johnson, an art history professor at Oberlin College. Hesse arrived with a stack of recent drawings that so impressed Johnson and her colleague Athena Tacha (the Allen’s first curator of modern art) that they mounted an impromptu exhibition in the art building behind the museum. Tacha had first heard of Hesse through artists Sol LeWitt and Mel Bochner, and had visited her studio in New York, where she first saw Hesse’s Laocoön sculpture. At the urging of Johnson and Tacha, the Allen acquired this work in 1970.

Recognizing the Allen’s early interest in Eva Hesse’s work, the artist’s sister, Helen Hesse Charash, donated both archival materials and hundreds of artworks to the museum. The Eva Hesse Archive comprises more than 1,300 items documenting Hesse’s life and work: notebooks, diaries, datebooks, sketchbooks, photographs, exhibition-related ephemera, postcards, and letters. These materials join more than 300 artworks by Hesse in the Allen’s permanent collection—a resource for scholars and a living testament to the artist’s boundless creativity and determination.

Accompanying the exhibition is the book Eva Hesse: Oberlin Drawings, published by Hauser & Wirth, which illustrates the more than 300 drawings by Hesse in the Allen’s collection ($60 at the museum and $70 at amam.oberlin.edu, including shipping).

Organized by the Estate of Eva Hesse and Hauser & Wirth in collaboration with the Allen, the exhibition would not have been possible without the generous and transformative gifts of the late artist’s sister, Helen Hesse Charash. Forms Larger and Bolder was curated by Andrea Gyorody, former Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art (now interim director of the Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University), and Barry Rosen of the Estate of Eva Hesse.