The net sculptures hanging from the ceiling of David Zwirner Gallery (537 West 20th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) in New York are reminiscent of Bruno Munari's 1946-47 installation "Concavo-Convesso" (Concave-Convex). Yet there is a main difference: Munari's piece was a sort of cloud or shell-like structure made with a simple square metal net, while the objects on display here are hand-woven wire abstract sculptures that call to mind oversized intricate baskets or crawfish traps. The pieces were created by Ruth Aiko Asawa and they are part of a compact exhibition about the artist (until 21st October).
Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, California, from Japanese parents. During World War II, her family was interned first at the Santa Anita racetrack and then at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas.
During her internment Asawa spent her time drawing and, after getting an ID card from the War Relocation Authority, she was allowed to travel to Milwaukee where she attended college. Since no school in Wisconsin would hire someone who was Japanese even at the end of the war, she could not complete her fourth college year that was supposed to be devoted to practice teaching.
She therefore enrolled in the Escuela Nacional de Pintura y Escultura La Esmeralda in Mexico City and at the University of Mexico. Here she met Clara Porset, an innovative furniture designer from Cuba who had been at Black Mountain College where Asawa decided to move to pursue further studies in art.
From 1946 to 1949, Asawa studied with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College where she started using common materials and experimenting with wire. She was also influenced by the Black Mountain College summer sessions of 1946 and 1948, that featured among the others choreographer Merce Cunningham, artist Willem de Kooning, and architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller.
In 1959 Asawa married architect Albert Lanier and in the following decade she started making crocheted industrial wire sculptures employing a technique she learnt in 1947 while in Toluca, Mexico, where villagers made egg baskets from galvanized wire.
Asawa started creating a series of spheres, cones and elongated structures hat she suspended in space. More experiments followed in the '60s: Asawa moved from the geometrical shapes she found in nature to design ethereal structures reminiscent of radiolaria, and created large wall-mounted pieces inspired by the internal structure of a desert plant.
The exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery includes works on paper that should be rediscovered for their colourful patterns or intricate delicate lines forming abstract motifs, photographs of the artist by Imogen Cunningham and a selection of Asawa's hanging sculptures. Where she first started making them, Asawa was dismissed by critics as a craft maker and not a proper artist, but, looking at the pieces, you realise they embody all the principles she learnt at Black Mountain College.
The sculptures reunite indeed art, craft, design and a passion for finding humble materials that could be radically transformed. They also represent a subversion of traditional crafts taken from a domestic and functional environment (think about the egg baskets) and elevated to art: wire is used as if it were a pencil, to draw a line that traces and traps a space, while guaranteeing its freedom. The wire sculptures project indeed their shadows on the walls proving they are made of solid materials, but at the same time they are transparent and poetical magic lanterns suspended in mid-air.
Spheres, hourglass shapes and elongated tubes evoke organic forms: Asawa took inspirations for these silhouettes from nature as she loved studying and observing plants, snails, insect wings and spider webs.
These modular cells or bubbles of lightness and transparency form an eerie metal wire forest in the gallery space, enchanting visitors and reminding them they were made by the artist employing a traditional technique, but they still look modern and complex, at times betraying the infuence of Asawa's friend Buckminster Fuller's mathematical models and geometric mobile constructions.
Asawa died in 2013 and David Zwirner represents from this year her estate, so hopefully there will be more events about her that will inspire today's creative minds to explore again the artist's techniques.
There is also an intriguing connection with fashion that may help reintroducing the artist to a new generation of people, Asawa's sculptures appeared indeed in a Vogue photoshoot in 1953, juxtaposed to a series of light architectural coats.
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Posted by: Kmaustral | October 20, 2017 at 01:23 AM