A Line Can Go Anywhere

David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) at the gallery’s London location. This will be the first major presentation of the artist’s work outside of the United States and will include a number of her key forms, focusing in particular on the relationship between her wire sculptures and wide-ranging body of works on paper.

An influential artist, devoted activist, and tireless advocate for arts education, Asawa is best known for her extensive body of hanging wire sculptures. These intricate, dynamic, and sinuous works, begun in the late 1940s, continue to challenge conventional notions of sculpture through their emphasis on lightness and transparency. Relentlessly experimental across a range of mediums, Asawa also produced numerous drawings and prints that, like her wire sculptures, are built on simple, repeated gestures that accumulate into complex compositions. Although she moved between abstract and figurative registers in her sculptures and drawings, respectively, viewed together, the works in this exhibition nevertheless incite a rich dialogue and find commonality in their sustained emphasis on the natural world and its forms, as well as in their deft use of the basic aesthetic concept of the line.

“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.”

Image: Ruth Asawa, Sculptor, at Her Door, 1963 (detail). Photo by Imogen Cunningham. © 2020 Imogen Cunningham Trust