Copper Crochet: Ruth Asawa

Written By Unknown on Kamis, 27 Maret 2014 | 21.17

Uma Nair
27 March 2014, 03:52 PM IST

Christie's offers a Best of Best exhibition in Hong Kong that promises to showcase sterling quality works of art from the Asian fold and Ruth Asawa is a phenomenal discovery. Asawa transformed inert materials into dynamic physical constructs, co-opting paper, wire, clay, concrete, fiber, steel, and bronze to express her extraordinary vision. Her graceful biomorphic forms engage in a play with light creating shadow configurations which extend the range of each work from sculpture to environment or installation. Her sculptures and her career trajectory have been compared with those of Lee Bontecou and her artistic influence continues to be seen today in this selection of works from the early 50s and 60s.To look at an Asawa creation is to look at the melding of art and aesthetics-a finer feeling for what the delicate nuances of detail can bring to the trained eye.

Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, California, and lives in San Francisco. Following her internment in Arkansas during WWII Asawa attended Black Mountain College where she studied with Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller from 1946-49. As well as being a practicing artist, Asawa was instrumental in developing art education in San Francisco. Her work is included in important private and public collections nationally and in 2006 received recognition in the form of a major retrospective at San Francisco's de Young Museum (which traveled to the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, California).

For the past forty years, Ruth Asawa has pushed paper, wire, clay, concrete, fiber, steel, and bronze into forms that not only taught her about the different medium, but also honed her skills in the art-making process.

Obviously she hungered for something distinctive and different- ordinary paint and paper failed to exactly express her vision, so she brought in "material" reinforcements, changed core elements, or moved the work into a different dimension all together. This willingness to utilize unusual media and experiment with insights of a process led Asawa to surprising places. In one example what started on a sheet of paper as a two dimensional drawing of organic plant patterns became a three-dimensional wall sculpture of tied and crocheted wire. Transformation - changing inert materials into dynamic physical forms—became a signature of Asawa's unique vision.

Ruth Asawa's wire sculptures transform inert materials into dynamic physical constructs, co-opting paper, wire, clay, concrete, fiber, steel, and bronze to express her extraordinary vision. For over forty years, she pushed her materials in directions that challenged not only their physical attributes but also their traditional dimensional placement on pedestal, wall, and floor - ultimately hanging or suspending the works to activate the spaces surrounding them. Her graceful biomorphic forms engage in a play with light creating shadow configurations which extend the range of each work from sculpture to environment or installation.

 

 

Asawa considered these sculptures three-dimensional drawings. Instead of the lines moving across the paper, the lines move through three-dimensional space. "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." If you could see these sculptures in person, you could view them at different angles and observe how they continuously change depending on your viewing angle. 

Asawa learned the basic technique for making these sculptures in Toluca, Mexico in 1947. The Mexican villagers used a crocheting technique to make egg baskets from galvanized wire. The outside form of these sculptures comes from patterns that she drew as a young child on the farm. "We had a leveller," she explained. "It was pulled by four horses. Any bump in the rows made it impossible to irrigate. The rows had to be even so every plant got watered. I used to sit on the back of the leveller with my bare feet drawing forms in the sand, which later in life became the sculptural forms that make up the bulk of my sculptures." As the leveller advanced, Asawa swung her feet out and brought them closer together, so that the two lines in the sand diverged and converged and diverged again. The basic shape she drew in the earth can be seen in the hourglass form of her crocheted wire sculptures. And the two works at Christies are bound to turn heads and invite contemplation.


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