Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt
February 23–May 18, 2014
Blanton Museum of Art
MLK and Congress
Austin, Texas
Curator: Veronica Roberts
Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt celebrates the close friendship between two of the most significant American artists of the post-war era: Eva Hesse (1936–1970) and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). While their practices diverged in innumerable, seemingly antithetical ways—LeWitt’s art is associated with ideas and system-based conceptual art and Hesse’s is associated with the body and her own hand—this exhibition of approximately 40 works will highlight the crucial impact that their decade-long friendship had on both their lives and work.
In 1970, immediately upon learning of Hesse’s premature death at the age of 34, LeWitt created a wall drawing filled with “not straight” lines as a way of paying homage to the organic contours that were a hallmark of Hesse’s art. Organized by the Blanton, the exhibition will take this wall drawing, Wall Drawing #46, as its point of departure, while also revealing the way Hesse’s approach to making art had vast-reaching implications on LeWitt’s work. Included are wall drawings, sculpture, painting, drawings, prints, and correspondence between the artists.
