Continuing through September 2, 2025
“Ruth Asawa: Retrospective” is a massive gathering of more than 300 objects created over a seven-decade career. The presentation will make those already versed in her art rethink everything you thought you knew about both Asawa’s art and her life. It reveals that it is best to approach her hanging sculptures without reference to the body, even when they stand upright. If anything, the purpose of that verticality is to establish a figure-ground relationship with the walls behind them and
in relation to the other sculptures hanging or standing nearby. Seen in this context, these signature works most resemble calligraphic strokes positioned in sequence. Presented as a group they are animated by the negative space around them. The variable of the shadows cast behind them produces a double array of translucent objects with dramatic penumbras.
Each of Asawa’s sculptures is an experiment in topography, a solution to a problem that is the welcome product of the artist’s imagination, and is addressed by extremely patient fingers. Early in her development Asawa was driven to learn how the eye and mind perceive the interplay of mathematical order and material presence. Famously, much of what Asawa accomplished over her long career had roots at Black Mountain College, where she studied during the late 1940s. There she produced prints and drawings under the mentorship of Josef and Anni Albers. Math learned from Max Dehn helped her master the science behind the Albers’ design ideas. Her improvisations using Greek meanders, a familiar ancient design element that has been called a labyrinth in linear form, are remarkably successful early works, transcending juvenilia. Of particular note is the stunning black and white folded paper shield, “Untitled, S691, Wall Mounted Paper Fold with Horizontal Stripes” (1951).
Many of those early drawings were made in response to Josef Albers’ assignments, such as “Fold” (1948), whose marks cover the page in rows, but which deliberately avoid cohesion. They exude an energetic, youthful delight in the sheer act of mark making. The varying colors and thicknesses of the lines anticipate of what she would later achieve with different gauges of copper, iron and aluminum wire, with the white of the pages corresponding to the transparency of the sculptures. Similarly, her 1948-49 inkpad improvisations, which feature floral and other organic shapes, display a whimsy that retains the insouciant charm of art that repurposes found materials toward aesthetic ends. “Untitled (BMC.145, BMC Laundry Stamp” (c. 1948-49) has a loose, textile-like weave that embraces imperfection.
Drawing continued as a central aspect of Asawa’s work throughout her career. She would often work out her complex sculptural intentions in advance, on paper, at times using commercially available screentone patterns. The exhibition includes two galleries full of her botanical drawings, which she often gifted to visitors who brought her flowers. They are unfussy and of a piece with her interest in natural growth patterns, transparency, and figure-ground elusiveness. There are also puddly watercolors such as “Untitled Plane Tree” (1959) that had their origin in childhood calligraphy lessons.
A set of floral prints executed at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1965 are among the most mature and resolved of her two-dimensional creations. But by the 1950s, much of Asawa’s energy was already invested into three-dimensional variations on what she termed her tied wire forms. These works, often burnished with electroplating, follow growth patterns found in nature. While many of the resulting sculptures readily call up floral references, Asawa was also drawn to hybrid imagery, half plant and half manufactured products.
Asawa has often been quoted saying that she was extending drawing into space and nesting forms within forms. Besides those shadows, she also addressed spatial phenomena with multiple intersections, transparency, and the muting of contrast between exterior and interior. Spheres and cones, lobes and baskets all overlap to produce a wide array of forms from a narrow selection of building blocks. Colored metal wires are essential to establishing the complexity of many of the works.
Asawa’s hanging sculptures are either closed (as in “Untitled,” S.310, “Hanging Five-Lobed Continuous Form with Spheres in the Second, Third, and Fifth Lobes” [1955]), or open (as in “Untitled,” S.573, “Hanging Five-Lobed, Multi-Layered Form with One Hyperbolic Form Interlocking with Two Half-Hyperbolic Forms, Two Concave Forms at the Bottom, and One Convex Open Form at the Second Lobe” [1954]) Closed or open, they are best approached with the idea of a mobius strip in mind, demonstrating how interior and exterior surfaces can change positions in or on a single object.
Because Asawa constructed her sculpture by hand, loop by laborious loop, it becomes unimportant to think of them in terms of given formal categories. Each piece and each surface follows its own formula to create globes within globes, tunnels leading to other bulbs, on and on in an infinite system of replications. The closed objects culminate in shapes without windows or gaps. Those featuring open forms are even more affecting in their asymmetry and dynamism, further highlighted and enriched by their ornate edges. There is an initial sense of sameness, but they are anything but identical, or even particularly similar. For someone who, say, is uninterested in reading, a book might appear just page after repetitive page of boringly meaningless text. But for an avid reader, each sentence forms a complete world. Asawa’s hanging sculptures claim this vital autonomy; taken singly or in a group of hundreds, they tell a tale as compelling as a masterfully written story.
