Works by Ruth Asawa were included in this group exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York
2017
April 15–August 13, 2017
A hanging looped wire sculpture by Ruth Asawa was included in the critically acclaimed group exhibition Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
Presented at MoMA for the first time, Untitled (c.1955) is part of the extensive body of wire sculptures for which Asawa is best known. The sculpture is a promised gift to the MoMA collection.
Explaining her fascination with wire as a material, Asawa said, "I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It's still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere." The artist began making wire sculptures in the late 1940s following her enrollment at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she absorbed the teachings and influences of Anni Albers (whose work is also included in Making Space), Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and Merce Cunningham, among others, and embraced her own vocation as an artist.
Read more: Holland Cotter's review of the exhibition in The New York Times