Eva Hesse: Untitled , 1965, drawing and gouache on paper, 49.6 x 64.7 cm; courtesy Tate ©Estate of Eva Hesse

Retrospectives can be dull, educational affairs. A history-lesson-sense can attach itself to the progression of works. And worthy tours through an artist's career development sometimes mute the wonder that a more curatorially creative environment can release. Eva Hesse at SFMOMA (previously on show in Wiesbaden, and coming to Tate Modern in November) is a different experience altogether. There is a freshness and immediacy to even the earliest pieces, which work to whet the appetite for the amazing breakthrough-sculptural forms which are to follow. Even more amazing when you realise that these earliest pieces, the works on paper, were made in the sixties - and that the entire exhibition is the result of an intensely creative, incredibly brief artistic career - a span cut short with the artist's death from a brain tumour in 1970.

Eva Hesse: Untitled or Not yet , 1966, net bags, clear polythene sheeting, paper, metal weights, and string, 180.3 x 39.4 x 21cm; courtesy the Estate of Eva Hesse, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich/Tate Modern

An inevitable air of mortality hangs over the exhibition. The pace of Hesse's creative development speaks of a frantic desire to find a suitable form for her ideas. "Must paint soon," she wrote in 1960. "Drawing is not enough." But, by 1965, painting was not enough either. She had worked through monochromatic pieces, and bursts of colour, and now her abstract expressionist canvases and drawings were reaching beyond their frames in collages that soon shed the frame altogether and became the sculptures which form the finale to this exhibition - these are astonishing, especially when you pause to consider that all these major works were conceived and completed in just five years.

Eva Hesse was born in Germany in 1938 and brought up and educated in America. She then returned to Germany in 1965 for a year's residency. Her work therefore is a marriage of the then-emergent American and European artistic trends, trends which came to characterise a transatlantic artistic dialogue which predominated throughout the sixties and seventies (and still lingers). Hesse's sculptures are an intellectual fit for the minimalist mould of Donald Judd, and yet they carry the playful physical and sexual surrealism of Louise Bourgeois' explorations. And Hesse cannot be quantified by a single material tradition either: she was one of the first artists to experiment with 'new' materials like fibreglass and resin. Thus the freshness of her sculptures can seem disconcertingly recent - and even seem to represent the culmination of creative processes which some contemporary artists are still undergoing, more than thirty years later.

Eva Hesse: Untitled , 1966, ink and pencil on paper,29.9 x 22.9cm; courtesy the Estate of Eva Hesse, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich

It is these materials which add a layer of fragile poignancy to the sense of truncated creativity which attaches to these pieces. Many of Hesse's works are actually decaying. Falling apart. And therefore it is impossible to look at the exhibition without the sense that this is the last time many of these works will be on public display, and definitely the last time that such a survey of Hesse's output will be gathered together.

The curatorial and conservation issues which this raises were discussed in a roundtable convened as the exhibition was being organised. Curators, family, conservators, collectors and artist friends of Hesse considered the implications of showing work which was not now as the artist had made it; and the showing of which could hasten its decay. The conclusions of this discussion (which is reproduced in the excellent accompanying catalogue) were naturally inconclusive, and yet explore interesting points as to the value of art collected and hoarded away from public view. They make for valuable reading in the context of contemporary patterns of large, global, touring shows, and the fragility of much of today's new-media work.

"Something valuable?" asks collector Werner Kramarsky, "Are you talking about monetary value, or are you talking about the value of large numbers of people who are interested in seeing something?" ¹ The experience of seeing this exhibition answers that question (at least) conclusively. When it comes to Tate Modern, don't miss it.

Eva Hesse: Ringaround Arosie , 1965, pencil, acetone, varnish, enamel, paint, ink and cloth-covered electrical wire on papier mache and Masonite, 67 x 41.9 x 11.4.cm; courtesy the Estate of Eva Hesse, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich

Gemma Tipton is a writer.

Eva Hesse, SFMOMA, San Francisco, February - May 2002 and at Tate Modern, London, November 2002-March 2003

¹ Eva Hesse , edited by Elisabeth Sussman, SFMOMA, San Francisco 2002. p310.