Eva Hesse was one of the most original sculptors of the 1960s in the United States. Born to a Jewish family in Hamburg, Germany, she and her family fled the Nazis and came to the United States when she was three. Hesse studied at Pratt Institute, the Art Students League, Cooper Union, and the Yale School of Art and Architecture. Her notebooks mention repeated abandonments: her parents' divorce, her mother's suicide, and Hesse's separation from her husband. Throughout her life she battled mental instability. Hesse died of a brain tumor in 1970.

Together with like-minded artists, including Robert Morris, Jackie Winsor, and Lynda Benglis, Hesse modified the geometry and repetition of 1960s minimalism to what is known as post-minimalism. Like minimalist sculpture that relates to its surrounding space, many of her works engage more than one surface. However, where minimalist work emphasizes its relationship to the viewer's space, Hesse refocused that relationship to the viewer's body and imbued it with erotic undercurrents. She also introduced an organic sensibility and element of chance, and much of her work retains an intentional ugliness to create a sense of imperfection that opposes minimalism's flawlessness.

Hesse's work combines opposing forces, such as feminine/masculine, hardness/softness, and freedom/confinement. These incompatibilities give her work a feeling of absurdity, animation, and humanness that result in an intensity that sets her work apart from that of other post-minimalists.

Part of Hesse's originality lies in her use of unexpected materials, such as rubber, cord, fiberglass, and latex. She also used techniques associated with "feminine" occupations, such as wrapping, winding, and threading. Hesse's work has continued to influence other artists. Her allusions to body parts, sexuality, and femininity have made her work particularly meaningful to sculptors including Petah Coyne, Rona Pondick, and Kiki Smith.