In a now-famous 1970 interview, her death imminent, Eva Hesse told Cindy Nemser, “In my inner soul, life and art are inseparable. . . . Absurdity is the key word. It has to do with contradictions and oppositions.” Her affinity for paradox is revealed in her art as an extraordinary synthesis of organic and geometric form, a synthesis tempered by a sharp analytic edge. Hesse’s work ended by subverting Minimalism’s extreme insularity, causing what Robert Pincus-Witten aptly called its “disintegration.”

A recent retrospective at Yale brought together a substantial selection of works, providing a rare