An elegantly lyrical and intricately constructed drawing in space, Ruth Asawa’s remarkable hanging sculpture Untitled (S.267, Hanging Six-Lobed, Four Part, Discontinuous Surface, with Interior Forms in the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Lobes) represents a holistic reassessment of the boundaries of the medium. Executed circa 1952, shortly after the artist left North Carolina’s Black Mountain College to settle in San Francisco and shortly before her first inclusion in the Whitney Biennial in 1955, Untitled (S.267) is one of the larger and more intricate sculptures from this early period. Of the known works from this decade that share the present example’s scale and complexity, three are held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, de Young Museum, and San Jose Museum of Art. Suspended effortlessly in midair, Untitled (S.267)’s mesmerizing lattice of undulating forms reveals the artist’s nuanced understanding of form and space, blurring the lines between interior and exterior, figure and ground, air and mass. The intertwining network of brass wire is methodically woven entirely by hand, producing an enigmatic form that is at once exquisitely delicate and powerfully moving, archetypal of Asawa’s revered praxis. The layered forms-within-forms, created by turning the swellings in on themselves, is one of the artist’s signature innovations and is here utilized in three of the lobes. Not only is the work itself masterfully assembled, but the remarkable way the looping lines interact with light and air, articulating graceful turns and enigmatic shadows, testifies to the artist’s immense ingenuity and discipline.

Asawa’s artistic development and achievement are inseparable from the racial and political environment of 1940s America. Born in California to Japanese immigrant farmers, Asawa and her family were separated and forced into internment camps along with many thousands of Japanese Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. While interned at the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, California, Asawa nurtured her love of art by taking drawing lessons from fellow internees who had been animators for Walt Disney Studios. Though she initially trained to be a teacher, lingering postwar discrimination prevented her from following that path and she instead enrolled as an art student at the legendary Black Mountain College in 1946. For the next three years, she studied alongside such luminaries as Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg, and worked under the innovative tutelage of Ilya Bolotowsky, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller and, most notably, Josef Albers. It was Albers’ emphasis on Bauhaus principles of formalism rooted in materiality, and traditional crafts as valid artistic methods in the pursuit of modern forms, that proved to be the generative point of Asawa’s career. As she later recalled, "The lesson taught us by Albers was to do something with a material which is unique to its properties. The artist must respect the integrity of the material. I realized I could make wire forms interlock, expand, and contract with a single strand because a line can go anywhere, whereas a solid sheet is limited." (Stephen Dobbs, "Community and Commitment: An Interview with Ruth Asawa," Art Education, vol. 34, no. 5, September 1981, p. 15)

Beginning with her earliest experiments with wire, Asawa’s artistic practice straddled the realms of art and craft. She first learned the looping technique of wrapping a wire around a wooden dowel from a basket maker on a trip to Mexico in 1947, but she quickly adapted it to create the majestic and abstracted hanging sculptures that have come to define her most celebrated output. By embracing the qualities of craftsmanship, including a labor-intensive method and a patient repetition of countless aggregated shapes, Asawa presaged the work of several significant artists including Yayoi Kusama, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, and Vija Celmins. At the time Untitled (S.267) was executed, Asawa was exploring new possibilities of tactile interwoven surfaces and multilayered silhouettes. Throughout the 1950s she created some of her most ambitious works that fully manifested concepts imparted to her by Albers at Black Mountain College. Embodying this artistic apex, Asawa’s wire recalls the linearity of drawn images, and the present work appears to be sketched through the air, reproducing its silhouette in dancing shadows on the walls and floor, altering slightly given the light and movement of air in its environment. This quality in Asawa’s work aligns her with Alexander Calder and his mobile sculptures such as Streetcar from a similar period to this work. Describing the advantages of her chosen media’s inherent linear quality, the artist has said: “I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It’s still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.” (Ruth Asawa quoted in: Exh. Cat., San Francisco, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, 2006, p. 138)

Asawa’s use of a distinctly modern, quotidian, industrial material like brass wire is all the more remarkable for the voluptuous, sensual, and organic forms she weaves with it. These curvilinear abstractions preserve the visual vocabulary of her childhood, as the artist has connected them to the lines her shifting toes made in the soil while she rode on horse-drawn farm equipment as a young girl. They are also inspired by her sensitivity to the poetic forms of nature: “These forms come from observing plants, the spiral shell of a snail, seeing light through insect wings, watching spiders repair their webs in the early morning, and seeing the sun through the droplets of water suspended from the tips of pine needles while watering my garden.” (Ruth Asawa quoted in: Sebastian Smee, review of Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Washington Post, 19 September 2018) In Untitled (S.267), these natural forms are summoned with structural clarity and transparency of form, foregrounding the work’s relationship to the space around it while still presenting an intricate and captivating surface of its own. A masterwork of modern artistic endeavor and patiently accumulated craft, Untitled (S.267) magnificently exemplifies Asawa’s celebrated and resolutely singular practice.

Artist

Ruth Asawa