Hang Up

<p>During her short career Eva Hesse explored the expressive, often eccentric possibilities of rigorous, reductive abstraction. She considered <em>Hang Up</em> to be her first significant work of art—the first to achieve the level of "absurdity or extreme feeling" she was seeking.</p><p>In the late I960s, at a moment when sculpture was supplanting painting as the avant-garde medium of choice, <em>Hang Up</em> emphasizes painting's most marginal feature, its frame. The frame here is sensitively painted but surrounds only blank wall. Instead it sprouts a generous loop of cord that protrudes at once gracefully and aggressively into the gallery space. Like a body, this strand of industrial tubing even succumbs to gravity, touching the floor.</p>