About the Art:
Untitled
1955
Brass and steel wire
63 7/8 × 14 15/16 × 14 15/16 inches
Promised gift of Alice and Tom Tisch
Asawa use of wire sculptures explores the relationship between interior and exterior shapes that are both inside and outside in a cohesive state. Untitled is a 3-dimentional hanging design showing the extreme talent of the artists ability to weave wire into the flowing symbiotic shapes. Its airy spaces flow seamlessly into one another, using organic lines that evoke shapes found in nature, including the human body, while also suggesting a gently undulating movement. Her work was often inspired by natural forms like tree rings, flowers, and the desert plants in her garden. She often described her sculptures as “three-dimensional line drawings in space,” highlighting her approach to form and structure.
About the Artist:
Ruth Asawa (American, b. 1926) was born in Norwalk, California to Japanese immigrants. She was an American sculptor known for her abstract looped-wire, 3-dimentional art forms inspired by natural and organic forms. In 1946, Asawa joined the avant-garde artistic community at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she studied under the influential German American Bauhaus painter and color theorist Josef Albers, as well as the American architect and designer Buckminster Fuller. Here she began creating the looped-wire art inspired by basket crocheting technique she learned in 1947 during a trip to Mexico. In 2010, the art school San Francisco School of the Arts she helped create was renamed Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts.