I study nature, and a lot of these forms come from observing plants. I really look at nature and I just do it as I see it. I draw something on paper. And then I am able to take a wireline and go into the air and dene the air without stealing it from anyone.

(Ruth Asawa)1

David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of sculptures and works on paper by American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) at the gallery’s Hong Kong location. The first solo presentation of Asawa’s work in Greater China, the exhibition provides an overview of the artist’s wide-ranging practice, focusing in particular on her affinity for the natural world, which in turn provided a constant source of inspiration in her art.

An artist, educator, and arts advocate, Asawa is celebrated for her extensive body of wire sculptures that challenge conventional notions of material and form through their emphasis on lightness and transparency. Born in rural California, Asawa first studied under professional artists while her family and other people of Japanese descent were detained at Santa Anita, California, in 1942. Following her release from an incarceration camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, sixteen months later, she enrolled at Milwaukee State Teachers College. Unable to receive her degree due to continued hostility against Japanese Americans, Asawa left Milwaukee in 1946 to study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, then known for its progressive pedagogical methods and avant-garde aesthetic environment. Asawa’s time at Black Mountain proved formative in her development as an artist; she was particularly influenced by her teachers Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and the mathematician Max Dehn. She also met architectural student Albert Lanier, whom she would marry in 1949 and with whom she would raise a large family and build a career in San Francisco. Asawa continued to produce art steadily over the course of more than a half-century, creating a cohesive body of sculptures and works on paper that, in their innovative use of material and form, deftly synthesizes a wide range of aesthetic preoccupations at the heart of postwar art in America.

Relentlessly experimental across a variety of mediums, Asawa moved effortlessly between abstract and gurative registers in both two and three dimensions, creating a vast and varied oeuvre that, despite its visual heterogeneity, reflects above all her belief in the total integration of artistic practice and family life. Spanning five decades, the works in this exhibition—many of which have never before been displayed publicly—exemplify the various and complementary facets of Asawa’s prolific career.

Asawa began making her looped-wire sculptures in the late 1940s, while still a student at Black Mountain College. The unique structure of these sculptures was inspired by a 1947 trip to Mexico, during which local artisans taught her how to create baskets out of wire. Executed in a number of intricate, interwoven configurations and at different scales and formats, the looped-wire sculptures in this presentation range from elaborate multilobed compositions to small spheres and billowing conical forms that require extreme technical dexterity to achieve. Several examples of the artist’s “form within a form” compositions will be on view, in which she created nested shapes from a single continuous surface of looped wire. Asawa considered this concept to be one of the most important in her work for both technical and conceptual reasons. As the artist later explained, “What I was excited by was that I could make a shape that was inside and outside at the same time”2.

Also on view in the exhibition are examples of Asawa’s iconic tied-wire sculptures, which she began making in 1962. Like many of the artist’s constructions, the series explores organic forms and processes. After having been gifted a desert plant whose branches split exponentially as they grew, Asawa quickly became frustrated by her attempts to replicate its structure in two dimensions. Instead, she utilized industrial wire as a means of mimicking the form through sculpture and, in doing so, studying its shape. Asawa was compelled by the fact that one can see through these sculptures while experiencing them, like viewing the sky through the gaps between tree branches.

Additionally featured are drawings and works on paper that, placed in dialogue with the sculptures, illuminate Asawa’s near-constant devotion to her creative pursuits and distinct way of seeing the world around her. She would habitually and constantly draw her everyday surroundings, producing in particular keenly observed images of plants and owers, frequently from her own garden or brought to her by family and friends. On view along with a selection of these drawings are works on paper from the 1950s whose geometric, patterned compositions are defined by a small number of basic shapes and motifs, recalling the design principles espoused by Albers that privilege the articulation of form through color. Like her wire sculptures, Asawa’s works on paper are built on simple, repeated gestures that accumulate into complex compositions.

Ruth Asawa’s (1926–2013) work has been exhibited widely since the early 1950s, including early solo exhibitions at Peridot Gallery, New York, in 1954, 1956, and 1958. In 1965, Walter Hopps organized a solo exhibition of the artist’s sculptures and drawings at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) in California; Asawa completed a residency at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles the same year. Other solo presentations include those held at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1973); Fresno Art Museum, California (2001; traveled to Oakland Museum of California through 2002); de Young Museum, San Francisco (2006); Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas (2012); and the Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena, California (2014).

In 2018 to 2019, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis presented the major museum exhibition Ruth Asawa: Life’s work. An accompanying catalogue published by the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and Yale University Press includes essays by Aruna D’Souza, Helen Molesworth, and Tamara H. Schenkenberg. The two-person exhibition, Lineage: Paul Klee and Ruth Asawa was on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2021. In 2022, Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the universe was on view at Modern Art Oxford, England, and later traveled to the Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Norway. In September 2023, Ruth Asawa through line, a solo presentation of the artist’s work, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and traveled to the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, in 2024.

Notes

1 Interview with Katie Simon, June 26, 1995, Ruth Asawa Papers at Stanford Special Collections: Series 7, Box 127, Folder 7, statements 1994–1995.
2 Ruth Asawa quoted in Karin Higa, “Inside and outside at the same time”, in Daniell Cornell, ed., The sculpture of Ruth Asawa: contours in the air. Exh. cat. (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2006), p. 30.