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Much in the same way that Hesse combined different materials, adopted and then concealed or exposed structures and forms in her drawings, paintings, and sculptures, piecing together the records left behind by her life produces contradictory images and impressions. This begins with the photographs showing Hesse throughout the sixties in her studios in Germany and New York: a young woman with the aura of a fashion model engaged in a strange symbiosis with her art. In her studio in the small town of Kettwig in West Germany, Hesse holds her painting Two in one from 1965 in front of her like a shield. The two circular relief forms on plywood resemble cemented, spiral-formed breasts or thoughts circling around on themselves and then suddenly hardened. A metal umbilical cord juts out between them. In a photograph taken in 1966 in New York, she’s cuddling her work Untitled (Not Yet), oversized plastic bags reminiscent of testicles or breasts tied into finely meshed nets. One of the later photographs shows the artist a year before her death. Hesse’s face seems swollen from the effects of the operations, radiation, and cortisone treatments she was subjected to to battle her brain tumor. Her gaze is directed at her sculpture Right After (1969). Like a gigantic spiderweb covered in latex, shiny ropes dangle in a kind of mobile, shimmering and glittering in the light as though dipped in dew or resin – stringy, dripping, hardening.
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