"I was interested in the economy of a line, enclosing three-dimensional space.... I realized that I could make wire forms interlock, expand, and contract with a single strand, because a line can go anywhere."
— Ruth Asawa

Utilizing a process she compared to “drawing in space,” Ruth Asawa created Untitled (S.045 Hanging Five-Lobed Continuous Forms Within a Form, with Spheres Suspended in the First, Second and Third Lobes) using taped fingers to loop wire around a wooden dowel.ⁱ Her wire constructions, transparent and suspended from the ceiling, subverted conventional conceptions of sculpture—indeed, when she first exhibited one in 1950, its very classification as sculpture was challenged.

 

Having remained in the artist’s family collection for decades following its creation, Untitled (S.045) arrives on the market at an auspicious moment in Asawa’s recent institutional and commercial “rediscovery.” The first major museum survey of Asawa’s work in over 10 years was presented at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis in 2018-2019, and Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the Universe will open next year at Modern Art Oxford before travelling to the Stavanger Kunstmuseum in Norway. Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa, a landmark biography by Marilyn Chase, was published earlier this year, while sculptures by the artist have been consistently achieving record-breaking prices.

 

John Yau on Asawa’s Untitled (S. O45)

 

John Yau is a poet and art critic who has written extensively on modern and contemporary art, and specifically on the work of Ruth Asawa. His monograph on the Chinese painter Liu Xiaodong will be published in spring 2021.

 

Asawa was born to Umakichi Asawa, a truck farmer, and his wife, Haru Asawa, in Norwalk, California, a farming community outside Los Angeles. The fourth of seven children, she grew up working on her family’s plot of rented land when she was not attending public school or a community-run Japanese school, where she studied calligraphy and kendo, a form of fencing. That Asawa would rise from this humble beginning to become one of America’s most innovative sculptors is an inspiring story of single-minded determination.

 

In February 1942, a few months after Pearl Harbor, her father was arrested by the FBI and sent to an internment camp in Lordsburg, New Mexico. In May 1942, Ruth and the rest of her family were relocated to the Santa Anita Racetrack, where she studied with Japanese artists who were also interned there. In September 1942, she and her family were transferred to the Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas, where she resumed her study of art and served as the art editor of the yearbook produced by the internment camp’s high school. After graduating in 1943, Asawa enrolled in Milwaukee State Teachers College, which had an affordable tuition, with the intention of becoming an art teacher.

 

Sponsored by the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council, a Quaker organization, Asawa moved to Milwaukee, earning credits toward her degree until 1946, when she learned that she would not be able to devote her fourth year to practice teaching because no school in Wisconsin would hire a person of Japanese descent. Undeterred by this rejection, she decided to go to art school, applying to the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, founded in 1933, which she had heard about from a friend.

"At once vulnerable and magisterial, [Asawa's sculptures] are suffused with the history, heritage, and humanity of a uniquely American artist."
— John YauAsawa arrived at Black Mountain as a shy 20-year-old who had not yet defined herself or her passion. By the time she left in 1949, she had completely transformed herself into a woman brimming with determination and possessing remarkable poise.

 

While at Black Mountain, Asawa befriended Josef Albers, who along with his wife Anni, were relatively unknown outside a small artistic circle at the time. Josef, who had previously taught at the Bauhaus, was engaged with painting, design, typography, and handicrafts, while Anni was a textile artist and printmaker. Each of them opened Asawa’s eyes to different processes and untraditional materials.

 

In the summer of 1947, under the sponsorship of the Quakers, Asawa returned to Mexico and worked as a volunteer teacher in the town of Toluca. While there, she learned about the wire loop, which the locals used to make wire baskets. The act of making a loop, or bundling wires together and tying them with a knot, soon became central to her work. The loop, done in profuse repetition, gave her the freedom to make a range of transparent forms that contain other transparent forms within them. Many of these works she suspended from the ceiling. Conceivably they could grow to any size, limited only by the dimensions of the room in which they were suspended.

 

"It is as if Untitled (S. O45) is a model for cells undergoing a transformation, a generative organism releasing spores or giving birth."
— John YauThrough the act of weaving, the artist transformed metal wire—an industrial material—into a cellular structure, something both microscopic and organic. Paradoxically, the structure is also a kind of armor, at once protective and vulnerable, with inside and outside visible at the same time.

 

Asawa’s drawings in space such as Untitled (S. O45)—buoyant structures of woven wire, light, and shadow—are like nothing else in modernist art, before or since. At once vulnerable and magisterial, their formal inventions are suffused with the history, heritage, and humanity of a uniquely American artist.

 

Cut from the Archives: Excerpts from Ruth Asawa: Of Forms and Growth

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Asawa’s work has been a subject of renewed commercial interest, mirroring the international institutional attention it has received since David Zwirner announced its representation of the artist’s estate in 2017.

 

• In the last year alone, the world auction record for Asawa has been broken twice and hammer prices have dramatically outperformed estimates—with five works achieving over $2,000,000. 

^{i, ii} Ruth Asawa, quoted in Jacqueline Hoefer, “Ruth Asawa: A Working Life,” The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, Berkeley, 2006, p. 16.