Installation view, Ruth Asawa: Drawing in Space, David Zwirner, New York, 2020.
On the occasion of an installation of wire sculptures, drawings, and lithographs by Ruth Asawa at David Zwirner’s 69th Street gallery in New York, this online presentation offers a view of the investigations of material and form, often inspired by nature, that defined the artist’s career for half a century.
Installation view, Ruth Asawa: Drawing in Space, David Zwirner, New York, 2020.
Installation view, Ruth Asawa: Drawing in Space, David Zwirner, New York, 2020.
Installation view, Ruth Asawa: Drawing in Space, David Zwirner, New York, 2020.
While best known for her innovative wire sculptures, Asawa had a deep connection to drawing and painting and often depicted plants, flowers, and other organic forms across her work that spanned fifty years. Here, we present a selection of the artist’s smaller sculptures along with prints and works on paper, many of which have not been widely shown.
See the presentation in person at David Zwirner 69th Street
Asawa began experimenting with looped wire as a student in the 1940s at the renowned Black Mountain College in North Carolina. The Bauhaus pioneer Josef Albers was among her instructors there and her most important mentor; he had a profound influence on her approach to making art, and her wire sculptures are deeply rooted in his teachings.
Asawa was inspired to begin experimenting with wire during a 1947 trip to Toluca, Mexico, where local craftsmen taught her how to create egg baskets from the material.
“Asawa recognized a quality in the baskets she encountered in 1947... that had appealed to her in the courses she took with Josef Albers the year before: the illusion of transparency.”
—Ann Reynolds, art historian
“I started in 1962 when a friend of ours brought a desert plant from Death Valley and said, ‘Here’s something for you to draw.’ I tried to draw it, but it was such a tangle that I had to construct it in wire in order to draw it. And then I got the idea that I could use it as a way to work in wire. I began to see all the possibilities: opening up the center and then making it flat on the wall, and putting it on a stand.”
—Ruth Asawa
“My curiosity was aroused by the idea of giving structural form to the images in my drawings. These forms come from observing plants, the spiral shell of a snail, seeing light through insect wings, watching spiders repair their webs in the early morning, and seeing the sun through the droplets of water suspended from the tips of pine needles while watering my garden.”
—Ruth Asawa
Asawa in her dining room with tied-wire sculptures, 1963 (detail). Photo by Imogen Cunningham. © 2020 Imogen Cunningham trust.
Raised on a farm in Norwalk, California, Asawa had a lifelong love of observing plants and the influence of foliage, flowers, and biomorphic forms manifests throughout her many bodies of work. Like her wire sculptures, Asawa’s prints and works on paper are often built on simple, repeated gestures that accumulate into complex compositions, typically engaging directly with the natural world and its forms. Across these works, plants and flowers are a recurring motif which Asawa drew from life in order to study their structure.
In 1965, Josef Albers recommended Asawa for a fellowship at the famed Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. The two-month workshop typically offered two artists a chance to collaborate with seven master printers. In a fateful stroke of luck, the second student never showed up, giving Asawa the undivided attention of all seven printers.
Ruth Asawa at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. © Hank Baum
During this prolific period, she produced more than fifty original lithographs, including works that investigate the form and color of succulents, hydrangeas, poppies, nasturtiums, irises, and desert flowers.
“In her lifetime, the artist Ruth Asawa weathered storms of weak interpretation … that made too much of her positions as a wife and mother and not nearly enough of her contributions to modernism and abstraction. Asawa’s hanging looped-wire sculptures were a triumph of line and form, playing with weight, gravity, visibility, the continuity of multiple spheres and cones, and the ambiguity of inside and outside space.”
—Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Artforum
Ruth Asawa’s sculptures in her living room, San Francisco, 1995. Photo by Laurence Cuneo. © The Estate of Ruth Asawa / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Asawa, whose artistic training was primarily in basic design and drawing, had a devoted drawing practice that she exercised daily to sharpen her perception and concentration. She was known for drawing every day, including while attending public meetings as an activist.
“I state, without hesitation or reserve, that I consider Ruth Asawa to be the most gifted, productive, and originally inspired artist that I have ever known personally. That statement includes many of this century’s most celebrated ‘greats.’”
—Buckminster Fuller
Header image: Ruth Asawa, sculptor, 1956 (detail). Photo by Imogen Cunningham. © Imogen Cunningham Trust