At 24, Eva Hesse was well informed on matters of recent art history, such as the Abstract Expressionist ethos of the New York School and its "second generation" response in the form of Color Field painting. In 1960 she set out as an independent artist, producing a series of what have since come to be referred to as "spectre pictures," according to curator E. Luanne McKinnon. What unites these expressionistic abstractions is their flirtation with imagery of the human body and self-portraiture, while they nonetheless seek to express something comparatively intangible, a recurring psychological motif such as a state of mind, a mood or a memory.
In this piece, Hesse hints at the common format of a studio-based self-portrait by the painter standing at her easel, although one would not see this at the outset, which is precisely Hesse's intention. As in many of the works from this series, Untitled presents a largely monochromatic palette of green pigment accentuated, or visually compartmentalized, by sharply contrasting tonalities articulating the two-dimensional space of the canvas. The compartmental imagery of Untitled will be repeated in Hesse's sculpture, such as in the Repetition Nineteen pieces, and may have been influenced by Hesse's exposure to the work of Louise Nevelson in MoMA's contemporaneous Sixteen Americans show. The gestural brushwork here derives from Hesse's training in the Abstract Expressionist style, while her restricted color scheme and compartmental leanings might be attributed to her study under Albers. All speaks to her desire to simplify, reduce and visually pare the subject down to its most essential qualities.