BASEL.- With her delicate wire sculptures, Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), the American artist of Japanese descent, holds a distinctive and influential place in 20th-century sculpture. She transformed the simplest materials into fascinating sculptures, dissolving the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, art and craft, action and contemplation. The first posthumous retrospective of her work – and her first retrospective in Europe – offers a comprehensive look at an oeuvre shaped by a spirit of experimentation, material research, and an exceptional understanding of form, space, and community. At the Fondation Beyeler, “Ruth Asawa” brings together over 200 works from every phase of her artistic career.
On the occasion of Ruth Asawa’s 100th birthday, the retrospective spans six decades of her extraordinary artistic career and brings together works from all periods and across all media, including her iconic wire sculptures, bronze casts, folded-paper works and an extensive selection of works on paper. The exhibition, which has been previously presented at various international venues, will feature around 15 additional works that will be shown exclusively in Basel, further highlighting the close connection between Asawa’s art and nature.
Ruth Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, California, and grew up on a farm. In 1942, a few months after Japan’s attack on the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor, the then-16-year-old and her family were unjustly incarcerated in internment camps, like over 100’000 other people of Japanese descent. Following the end of the Second World War, Ruth Asawa studied at the innovative Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1946-1949. There, the experimental environment with teachers and artists such as Josef Albers, Richard Buckminster Fuller and Merce Cunningham, alongside mathematician Max Dehn, played a major role in shaping her artistic development. During a 1947 trip to Toluca, Mexico, she learned a basket-making technique that she used to loop wire into suspended, organic-seeming sculptures. Asawa saw art, everyday life and social responsibility as inseparable.
After moving to San Francisco in 1949, Asawa continued to refine and expand the formal language of her looped-wire sculptures. The city remained the centre of her artistic activity until the end of her life. It was also where she started a family with her husband Albert Lanier, and raised six children, while simultaneously building a vibrant artistic and social environment. At the same time, she created a diverse range of drawings that are works in their own right. Beginning in the late 1960s, Asawa was commissioned to create several public artworks, fountains and monuments. These include the fountain Andrea, 1966-68, and San Francisco Fountain, 1970-73, as well as wall reliefs and memorial sites such as Garden of Remembrance, 2000-02, and the Japanese American Internment Memorial, 1990–94, through which she created spaces for people to come together – often in close collaboration with residents and local initiatives. Asawa was also a lifelong advocate for art education and championed its inclusion in public schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ruth Asawa passed away in 2013.
The exhibition traces the development of Asawa’s multifaceted oeuvre over six decades and shows how consistently she explored fundamental questions of form, space and material. From early drawings, works on paper and sculptures to her late studies of nature, it is clear how closely her different bodies of work are connected. In addition, another constant in Asawa’s work emerges: her sustained engagement with nature, which manifests itself in her work sometimes directly, sometimes more subtly.
One of the early key works is the relief-like paper work Untitled (S.691, Wall-Mounted Paperfold with Horizontal Stripes), 1951, in which Asawa explores the possibilities of folding as a transition from the plane to space. Her work with paper, which draws on her knowledge of origami and on material studies with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, provides a key starting point for her later sculptural thinking.
From 1947, Asawa developed her distinctive looped-wire sculptures. Works such as Untitled (S.407, Hanging Five-Lobed Continuous Form within a Form with Spheres in the Second and Third Lobes), ca. 1952, demonstrate the principle of nesting forms that she referred to as “continuous form within a form”. The seemingly transparent material of the hanging sculpture reveals the layered organic forms within. Continuous wire strands and surfaces are used to create transparent, organic-seeming bodies whose spatial effect is fully revealed only through the interplay of light, shadow and movement. Asawa was taught the technique in 1947 during a trip to Mexico, where she was inspired by traditionally made wire baskets. While her earliest works consisted of simple forms, over time they became increasingly complex and technically demanding. To create her sculptures, Asawa mostly used standard industrial wire in various metals, especially iron, brass and copper. In some works, such as Untitled (S.089, Hanging Asymmetrical Twelve Interlocking Bubbles), 1957, she used them in combination. The steady, patient manual work with wire reached back to Asawa’s childhood, when she built trellises by wrapping wire around stakes in the bean field of her parents’ farm.
Drawing and painting were a constant accompaniment to sculptural work throughout Asawa’s life. Watercolours such as Untitled (PF.1016, Eucalyptus Grove) from 1961 or ink drawings of the plane trees in Golden Gate Park explore the relationship between positive and negative forms and the meaning of space. The influences of Japanese calligraphy combine here with insights gained during her studies at Black Mountain College to create an independent visual language.
A tireless spirit of experimentation characterises Asawa’s entire body of work. In 1962, friends brought her back a desert plant from an excursion, which inspired her to create a new form of sculpture. In addition to the looped-wire sculptures, she also began creating sculptures from bundles of tied wire. Works such as Untitled (S.184, Hanging Tied-Wire, Single-Stem, Multi-Branched Form Based on Nature) from ca. 1962 or Untitled (S.238, Wall-Mounted Tied-Wire, Open-Center, Five-Petaled Form Based on Nature) from the mid-1970s, show how Asawa translated the processes of growth in nature into abstract spatial structures.
This love of experimentation is particularly evident in the lithographs she produced in 1965. During a three-month stay at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, she created more than 50 lithographs, in which she experimented with a printmaking technique that was new to her and continued her exploration of plant structures.
Asawa seamlessly integrated her artistic approach into everyday life. Underlying this was the conviction that creativity is not confined to art, but is inherent in all areas of life and can be productively nurtured. One example of this in the exhibition is Doors (S.528, Carved Redwood Doors for Ruth Asawa’s Home), the carved doors she made for her home in 1961. Another striking testament to it is Asawa’s sustained commitment, from the 1970s onwards, to integrating art into primary-school education.
The exhibition concludes with works from the 1970s to the 1990s, including watercolours and large-scale ink drawings of flowers and fruits. In works such as Untitled (WC.003, Cherries in a Bowl), mid 1980s to early 1990s, and Untitled (PF.151, Ginkgo Leaves on Three Branches), ca. 1995, Asawa turns her attention to everyday subjects and uses just a few lines and subtle areas of negative space to reveal the spatial relationships that characterise her entire oeuvre. This makes clear that her drawings, sculptures and prints should be understood not as separate bodies of work, but as different expressions of a consistent artistic approach.
The exhibition catalogue, edited by Theodora Vischer for Fondation Beyeler, is published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin. Designed by Teo Schifferli, it is the first publication to present Ruth Asawa’s work in German. In addition to numerous depictions of her work, its 208 pages contain contributions by Janet Bishop, Edouard Kopp, Cara Manes and Laura Wilde, and a detailed chronology by Dominika Tylcz. The English-language catalogue was produced by SFMOMA in collaboration with Yale University Press.
The Ruth Asawa retrospective is an exhibition partnership between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. This presentation was developed in collaboration with the Fondation Beyeler.
The Ruth Asawa retrospective is co-organized by Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler is curated in collaboration with Chief Curator Theodora Vischer.
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