Wire Sculptures by Ruth Asawa

This installation of fifteen metal sculptures offers an overview of San Franciscos artist Ruth Asawa’s signature vocablary based on the visual possibilities of wire.

Beginning with works from the 1950s when Asawa was showing with the Peridot Gallery in New York City, the installation presents sculptures that the artist has identified as particularly significant in the evolution of her career. Asaway joined the museum’s director and curator to express her vision for how the sculptures, and, at every turn, the same keen sensitivity to light and space that animates the artist’s sculpures is evident in their placement.

Born in1926 in Norwalk, California, Asawa is a pioneerin modernist sculptor. Growing out of her experiences at Black Mountain College, the famous innovative art school in North Carolina, she created her earliest works in the 1940s under the mentorship of Josef and Anni Albers. Consistent with the experimental emphasis at the college, Asawa invented a new sculptural language of open, wire contours that are either woven or tied, incorporating the aesthetic values of modernism into a highly original vision of classical shapes an unexpected materials. In this work, she performs a series of uncanny metamorphoses, revealing the structural properties of natural forms and transforming the commonplace into metaphors for life processes. de Young museum