Camden Art Center’s current exhibition, comprised of a careful selection of Eva Hesse’s smaller sculptures from the last years of her life, showcases intimate folded, hanging, and encased works in neutral tones that have not previously been a defining group in Hesse’s oeuvre. Through the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue, art historian and curator Briony Fer attaches new significance to these works by defining them not as preparations, experiments, or unfinished pieces, but as ‘studioworks’. She proposes an interpretation through which we question traditional notions of sculpture and place all pieces of an artist’s creative process under equal consideration.

In this show we feel the poignant fragility of Hesse’s work, which forces us to confront the ephemerality of life and of her works themselves. Thirteen pieces of paper and found materials are displayed on a large platform as if they floated there in a cartographic compilation. Their materiality becomes central, and though seemingly used, deflated, shell-like, or residual, they are the source of an unsuspected liveliness and harness a calm gravity of experience.

The exhibition evokes a sense of recurrent movement: the air that passes silently through the tiny holes in Hesse’s 1969 alabaster-colored resin, cheesecloth, latex, and fiberglass work which hangs delicately from the ceiling; the transfer of life and memory that resides in the work to the imagination of its viewer, suggested not least by umbilical-like appendages; the movement of the visitors through the intimate space. Indeed, the exhibition is a personal venture, propelled by the memories that each of us bring to it.

It’s a smart show whose academic foregrounding enhances but does not interfere with the beauty of its presentation and content. The simplicity of the two-room display - four white display cabinets, wall text with only the most minimal information - encourages us to look. The show makes this our prime task, to which the work lends itself joyfully.

Until Mar 7

ELIZABETH BUHE