The Erotic Affinities between Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke
Cassie Packard, frieze
June 2021
Writing in The Hudson Review in the spring of 1967, Lucy Lippard distilled a nascent strain of erotic abstraction in her essay ‘Eros Presumptive’. The critic – who had just curated her first show, ‘Eccentric Abstraction’, at Fischbach Gallery in New York – had found the explicitly titillating work at two recent exhibitions in the city to be less than rousing: ‘Hetero Is, Erotic Is’ at Nycata Gallery and ‘Erotic Art 66’ at Sidney Janis Gallery. In response, she described an emergent tendency, seen in ‘Eccentric Abstraction’, which sensuously fused the absurdity of the surrealist object with minimalism’s phenomenological approach, and was extended to new materials like liquid latex and fiberglass. […]