Exceptional Works: Ruth Asawa

Featured as part of a special presentation at TEFAF New York is a rare large-scale example of Ruth Asawa’s tied-wire sculptures, a series begun in 1962. Spanning five feet in diameter, this work is a significant example of Asawa’s exploration of organic form. Other tied-wire sculptures are held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland; and Oakland Museum of California, among others. A related work, Untitled (S.317, Wall-Mounted Tied-Wire, Open-Center, Five-Pointed Star with Overlapping Branches), c. 1965, was recently acquired by the National Museum Of Art, Osaka, Japan and is currently on view.

Asawa began working with wire in the late 1940s as a student at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where her teachers included Josef Albers, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller. “I consider Ruth Asawa to be the most gifted, productive, and originally inspired artist that I have ever known personally,” Fuller later said. Asawa’s first posthumous museum retrospective, a collaboration between San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, opened recently in San Francisco and features more than three hundred works from her groundbreaking career. The show will travel to The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Bilbao; and Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland.

Wall-mounted forms such as the present work evolved from Asawa’s hanging double-sided forms; she would flatten these sculptures to be mounted on the wall like a relief. Asawa developed the open center for her wall-mounted forms in the mid-1960s, simultaneous with her exploration of petal and branching forms that were made by gathering straight wires into separate bundles formed into individual “petals” or “branches.” Here, Asawa used four intersecting bundles of wire that cross to create a square in the center before extending out in curved and straight branches toward the edges of the circular form. The artist often remarked on the importance of the centers of her tied-wire forms, as they serve to define the shape of the resulting work. At the same time, the play of shadow through the branches creates a sense of proliferation, as Vanilla Anandam observes: “Asawa’s tied wire sculptures are ... finished, tied off, enclosed—yet their shadows replicate the form … regenerating endlessly.”