During her short career Eva Hesse explored the expressive, often eccentric possibilities of rigorous, reductive abstraction. She considered Hang Up to be her first significant work of art—the first to achieve the level of "absurdity or extreme feeling" she was seeking.

In the late I960s, at a moment when sculpture was supplanting painting as the avant-garde medium of choice, Hang Up emphasizes painting's most marginal feature, its frame. The frame here is sensitively painted but surrounds only blank wall. Instead it sprouts a generous loop of cord that protrudes at once gracefully and aggressively into the gallery space. Like a body, this strand of industrial tubing even succumbs to gravity, touching the floor.