Eva Hesse Quotes

Eva Hesse shares absurd, reflective thoughts on art and life.

14 quotes

  1. Art and work and art and life are very connected and my whole life has been absurd. There isn't a thing in my life that has happened that hasn't been extreme - personal health, family, economic situations...absurdity is the key word...

  2. I think the circle is very abstract. I could make up stories of what the circle means to men, but I don't know if it is that conscious. I think it was a form, a vehicle. I don't think I had a sexual anthropomorphic, or geometric meaning. It wasn't a breast and it wasn't a circle representing life and eternity....I remember always working with contradiction and contradictory forms which is my idea also in life. The whole absurdity of life, everything for me has always been opposite. Nothing has ever been in the middle. When I gave you my autobiography, my life never had anything normal or in the center. It was always extremes.

  3. There's not been one normal thing in my life.

  4. I am not sure what my stand on lasting really is.

  5. Don't ask what the work is. Rather, see what the work does.

  6. I should like to achieve free, spontaneous painting delineating a powerful, strong structured image. One must be possible with the other. A difficult problem in itself, but one which I shall achieve.

  7. Artists don't think archivally.

  8. Art and life are inseparable.

  9. Life doesn't last; art doesn't last. It doesn't matter.

  10. First feel sure of idea, then the execution will be easier.

  11. Art is the easiest thing in my life, and that's ironic. It doesn't mean I've worked little on it, but it's the only thing I never had to... I have no fear. I could take risks.

  12. Chaos can be structured as non-chaos. That we know from Jackson Pollock.

  13. What makes a tight circle or a tight little square box more of an intellectual statement than something done emotionally, I don't know. Art is an essence, a center.

  14. I would like the work to be non-work. This means that it would find its way beyond my preconceptions...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. It is something, it is nothing.