252
Ruth Asawa
Chair (TAM.1558, Addie's Chair (Positive))
- Estimate
- $4,000 - 6,000
Further Details
Born to Japanese immigrants in 1926, Ruth Asawa faced much adversity in the United States, especially during World War II when she was placed in a Japanese internment camp after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Following the war, Asawa began pursuing a degree in art, which proved to be incredibly difficult due to anti-Japanese sentiment. Asawa found solace at Black Mountain College, and a mentor in Josef Albers. Albers gave her an assignment, to create “meander” drawings in his famous Basic Design class. This technique would serve as the foundation of the intricate linework evident in Asawa’s drawings, paintings, prints and sculpture. i“Art is not a series of techniques, but an approach to learning, to questioning, and to sharing.”
—Ruth Asawa
For Asawa, the practice of drawing was both the “greatest pleasure and most difficult.” Her drawings, prints and sculptures share the intention to visualize space in pursuit of understanding how we exist within it; while her sculptures organically morph and grow within open air, the radiant forms within Chair move between the foreground and background of the visual plane. Working with the renowned Tamarind Workshop, lithography felt like the natural choice of print medium, given its strong focus on draftsmanship. Her philosophy was that space is both an autonomous entity and a shared omnipresence, making her print a demonstration of her deep comprehension of negative and positive forms.
"The object of her gaze, the material she worked with, these were not special things—but because she focused so fully on these things she was able to make something extraordinary from the ordinary."
-Jonathan Laib, Senior Director at David Zwirnerii
This Chair is also known as Addie’s Chair, a reference to her daughter, who would have been seven years old at the time of this work’s production. With its delicate woven and concentric lines, this print maintains the essence of Asawa’s oeuvre. The chair motif was a favorite of hers, serving as an anchor within her drawing practice since the 1950s. Chair encompasses the essence of the artist’s personal and professional life and is included in the collection of notable institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
i Whitney Museum of American Art, Ruth Asawa Through Line, 2023, online.
ii “Ruth Asawa | All is Possible,” Flaunt, 2022, online.
Full-Cataloguing
Ruth Asawa
Born in the California countryside just before the Great Depression, Ruth Asawa was an American artist known for her intricate, ethereal sculptures made from crocheted wire. Asawa’s brilliantly layered hanging artworks simulate biomorphic forms and are beloved for their delicate atmospheric presence and gentle interaction with their environments, which often cast shadows as graceful and elaborate as the artworks themselves.
A promising artist since childhood, Asawa enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina after coming of age in the Japanese internment camp at Santa Anita, California. At Black Mountain, she studied under Josef Albers who introduced the young artist to the use of wire as an artistic material. Having learned of a wire crocheting technique used by the indigenous people of Toluca, Mexico to weave wire baskets on a class trip, Asawa elaborated on the process Albers introduced her to and applied it to the creation of her famed hanging sculptures. Liberated by the “economy of a line,” which enabled her to create artworks that existed in space and enclosed light without blocking it, Asawa relied on this practice for the majority of her artistic career and employed it in her most acclaimed works.
Asawa’s work is featured in the collection of major arts institutions worldwide such as the de Young Museum, San Francisco and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She was the subject of a major 2017 retrospective at David Zwirner Gallery in New York, which represents her estate. Asawa passed away in 2013 at the age of 87.