A screening of the film Eva Hesse will take place on Thursday, October 27 at 7 p.m. in Schroeder Hall, room 138. Director and producer, Marcie Begleiter and Karen Shapiro will take part in a Q&A after the screening.
On Friday morning, October 28, from 10 a.m.-noon at the University Galleries, there will be a presentation about the film by Begleiter and Shapiro along with a screening of a short film about Hesse’s materials and process that was made for the Hamburg Kunsthalle. University Galleries is located at Uptown Station at the corner of Beaufort and Broadway streets.
Both of these events are free and open to the University community and the public.
Eva Hesse (1936-1970) is one of America’s foremost postwar artists. Her pioneering sculptures using latex, fiberglass, and plastics, helped establish the post-minimalist movement. Dying of a brain tumor at age 34, she had a mere decade-long career that, despite its brevity, is dense with complex, intriguing works that defy easy categorization. Eva Hesse, the first feature-length appreciation of her life and work, makes superb use of the artist’s voluminous journals, her correspondence with close friend and mentor Sol LeWitt, and contemporary as well as archival interviews with fellow artists (among them, Richard Serra, Robert Mangold, and Dan Graham) who recall her passionate, ambitious, tenacious personality. Art critic Arthur Danto has written that her work is “full of life, of eros, even of comedy…Each piece vibrates with originality and mischief.” The documentary captures these qualities, but also the psychological struggles of an artist who, in the downtown New York art scene of the 1960s, was one of the few women to make work that was taken seriously in a field dominated by male pop artists and minimalists. – Karen Cooper, Film Forum
For additional information, contact the College of Fine Arts at 438-5621 or FineArts@IllinoisState.edu.
