Fundació Tàpies – Studio Works by Eva Hesse

After two years of building work, the renovated Fundació Tàpies is running a programme that presents, at the same time and across the centre’s different spaces, exhibitions of works by Tàpies from the Foundation’s collection alongside temporary exhibitions by various leading figures on the contemporary art scene.

Until 1 August, the Foundation is presenting a small show of Studio Works by Eva Hesse (1936–1970), a great opportunity to see works such as her latex and fibreglass sculptures up close. The studio works are the core of this exhibition and have been brought together from various collections. Hesse’s intense artistic career spanned just ten years, but her output has been of decisive importance for 20th-century art history. Eva Hesse’s career was abruptly cut short by her tragic death from a brain tumour in May 1970, when she was thirty-four. She left a studio full of works, both finished and unfinished, as well as numerous smaller pieces. The set of papier-mâché pieces in this exhibition is being shown in public for the first time.

It’s also a chance to visit the exhibition Alma Matrix, by the artists Bracha L. Ettinger and Ria Verhaeghe, in which we see how these two artists’ forms of representation create a space of care towards others. Ettinger (Tel Aviv, Israel, 1948) and Verhaeghe (Roeselare, Belgium, 1950) use images of anonymous people found in newspapers and archive material, which they bring together through methods of compilation and techniques of copying, erasing, tracing and painting.

And if you’re left wanting more, the Foundation’s media library has material on the featured artists.