Eva Hesse Studiowork

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Through Oct. 10

Eva Hesse was, “without doubt, one of the most influential artists” of the past half-century, said Sebastian Smee in The Boston Globe. Arriving at a moment when minimalism seemed played out, she not only broke up the movement’s all-male club but gave it an “afterlife.” Although the young sculptor embraced minimalism’s trademark “grids, repetition, and abstraction,” she injected her works with “a feeling for poetic associations—partic­ularly with skin and bodily matter—that would prove enormously influential.” Too bad, then, that the ICA’s “hermetic” new exhibit fails to capture any of that magic. Trotting out 40-some disparate objects the artist left in her studio when she died of a brain tumor in 1970, at age 34, it’s “the kind of show that presupposes a familiarity, if not an infatuation, with Hesse’s work—and even then risks triggering disappointment.” It’s a stretch to call many of these items artworks at all.

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Indeed, it’s like listening to “studio outtakes from a rock legend who died young,” said Greg Cook in The Boston Phoenix. In other words: “cool, but interesting mostly to hard-core fans.” You’d have to be fairly well indoctrinated to find meaning in such ephemera as the “dull grid of metal washers on a board,” or the “boomerang-like stuffed-canvas things” that vaguely suggest the germ of some never-completed Hesse masterpiece. Happily, though, there are a few pieces on display that “begin to suggest what has given her art staying power.” For instance, a “pair of black shapes—one looks like a pear, the other a sausage—are connected by a tube suspended by a nail.” Provocatively “eccentric,” they seem in equal measures “natural and alien, and definitely alive.”