There is a photograph from 1954 of Ruth Asawa sitting cross-legged on her studio floor, a half-finished wire sculpture in the works. Her hands are mid-motion, looping brass wire around itself in the same continuous gesture she would repeat and reinvent for the next sixty years. It's a small, unremarkable-looking action – wire bent into a loop, then another, then another – and yet from it grew one of the most distinctive sculptural vocabularies of postwar American art: bulbous, transparent forms that hang from gallery ceilings like floating jellyfish, their shadows pooling on the floor.
Born in 1926 on a farm in Norwalk, California, the fourth of seven children to Japanese immigrant parents, Asawa spent her early childhood riding the back of a farm leveler, dragging her feet through the dirt to make looping shapes – a memory she would later trace directly into the biomorphic forms of her sculptures. In 1942, the family was forced from that farm under Executive Order 9066. First to a temporary camp at the Santa Anita racetrack, where she took drawing lessons from Disney animators also were also incarcerated there, then to the Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas. She was sixteen, and after this, she enrolled at Milwaukee State Teachers College, only to be refused her art teaching degree because of anti-Japanese prejudice. In 1946 she went to the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she would study under Josef Albers and learn, as she put it, “how to see”.
Now, in the year that would have marked her hundredth birthday, Guggenheim Bilbao opens Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, an exhibition partnership between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and MoMA, developed in collaboration with the Bilbao museum. Spanning works across ten sections – paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and ephemera made between 1947 and 2006 – it is the most comprehensive museum retrospective of Asawa’s work to date. "This international retrospective presents the prolific artistic trajectory of Ruth Asawa," says Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, curator at Guggenheim Bilbao, who developed the exhibition alongside Janet Bishop of SFMOMA and Cara Manes of MoMA. “Asawa is one of the most important postwar artists of the 20th century, and her contribution to the language of abstraction is fundamental and evident throughout the six decades of her career.”
When asked what defines that practice, Gutiérrez-Guimarães is careful not to flatten it into a single medium or motif. The exhibition, she says, “highlights her role as an artist, innovator, creator and educator”, with sculpture, drawing and printmaking each given equal weight rather than treated as supporting acts to the wire work she's best known for. For visitors meeting Asawa for the first time, the show amounts to nothing less than “a significant discovery”.
That sense of discovery extends, too, to why the museum felt it was time to look again. Asawa's reputation has shifted considerably over the past decade, moving from being framed primarily through craft traditions and domestic labour towards broader recognition within histories of modern and postwar art. And Gutiérrez-Guimarães is alert to how differently her work now reads. “The language of abstraction is a universal idiom and likewise, Asawa's work lends itself to various global contexts – such as modern sculpture, nature or the artisanal tradition – demonstrating her multifaceted artistic practice," she says. “In this sense, her works offer a perspective on a familiar world, connecting us with visual and sensory experience.” The works once dismissed by some critics as baskets and fish traps are now understood as a sustained, decades-long investigation into how form, material and the natural world can be made to speak the same language.
Below, Gutiérrez-Guimarães selects five works from the retrospective that trace that investigation across six decades – from a yellow-grounded painting made in her final year at Black Mountain to a delicate ink drawing of flowers gifted by her son, sixty years later.
Untitled (BMC.52, Dancers), ca. 1948-49
Painted in oil on paper during Asawa's years at Black Mountain College, the small, vivid work shows a cluster of layered, rounded forms tumbling across a bright yellow background. The painting belongs to a wider series Asawa made in response to dance classes she took on campus, and the loose, looping forms she developed here would resurface a few years later in three dimensions, translated into wire. “The work features an abstracted dancing figure inspired by dance classes that Ruth Asawa took from Merce Cunningham and with Elizabeth Schmitt Jennerjahn in her final year at Black Mountain College,” says Gutiérrez-Guimarães. “[It] is composed of layered rounded forms on a yellow ground and it was a precursor to the artist's wire sculptures of the 1950s.”
Untitled (S.797, Hanging Two-Lobed, Three-Layered Continuous Form within a Form), ca. 1954
By the mid-1950s, Asawa had arrived at her signature motif: a single, unbroken length of steel wire looped continuously to enclose one volume inside another. In this hourglass-shaped piece – woven from steel wire – two bulbous lobes narrow into each other at a central waist, casting soft shadows through its surface wherever it hangs. It's a compact version of the idea Asawa would spend the rest of her career elaborating. “A prime example of Asawa's artistic investigation of her ‘continuous form within a form,’” says Gutiérrez-Guimarães, “in which she said: ‘You can show inside and outside, and inside and outside are connected. Everything is connected, continuous.’”
Untitled (S.270, Hanging Six-Lobed, Interlocking Continuous Form within a Form with Spheres in the First and Second Lobes), 1955, refabricated 1957-58
This six-lobed piece shows how far Asawa could stretch it. Strung together along a single vertical axis, six interlocking volumes descend in a long, waving silhouette, their proportions shifting from lobe to lobe so the piece narrows, swells and narrows again like a spine or a stem. In the first two lobes are smaller spherical forms, woven into the same continuous wire, so that looking through the mesh reveals further mesh inside it – repeating the logic of S.797 at a far more ambitious scale. Originally made in 1955 and rebuilt by Asawa herself a few years later, it was selected for a sequence of solo exhibitions at New York's Peridot Gallery that introduced her sculpture to a wider American audience. “A work that contains multiple connected lobes that form long sculptural silhouettes while the interior elements, such as the scones or spheres, create overlapping layers,” says Gutiérrez-Guimarães, “a prime example of her evolving sculptural vocabulary.”
Untitled (S.184, Hanging Tied-Wire, Single-Stem, Multi-Branched Form Based on Nature), ca. 1962
By the early 1960s, Asawa had begun to move away from the looped, lobed forms entirely, developing a new “tied-wire” technique that let her work more directly from nature. This piece, woven from galvanised steel wire into a single branching stem, traces the architecture of a desert plant – its branches appear tangled, each one bundled and twisted by hand. “In 1962, Asawa was gifted with a dried desert plant from Death Valley by some friends, which inspired her to pursue a new direction in her sculpture,” says Gutiérrez-Guimarães. “Drawing the plant, she found ‘its intricacy… made it impossible,’ and instead turned to the material of wire, and worked with bundles and spools manipulated by the artist into complex branches and other botanical forms into hanging sculptures from the ceiling or the wall.” The resulting works, suspended or wall-mounted, would be the focus of Asawa’s practice for decades.
Valentine Bouquet from Adam (PF.555), 1991
The retrospective also turns towards the garden of Asawa's own Noe Valley home, where she spent her later decades sketching the flowers and plants given to her by friends and family. Valentine Bouquet from Adam, made in ink on paper and named for her son, who tended his parents’ flowering plants in their later years, depicts a loose cluster of blooms rendered with the same overlapping lines and open space that had defined her wire work forty years earlier. “Over the course of her career, Asawa tirelessly returned to depicting plants and flowers, tracing the shapes of irises, hydrangeas, chrysanthemums and other flora from her garden in sketchbooks and works on paper,” says Gutiérrez-Guimarães. “For Asawa, drawing from life was more than simple observation; it became a value and mode of engaging with the world and present moment. ‘Life draws,’ she once wrote, expressing how the events and objects around her defined her work.”
