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.
BMC was a place where women could explore their identities as artists and individuals; a space where women were expected to question things, to think critically and to explore their own self determinacy. Through artworks, personal accounts and archival film and photographs, Question Everything! details how this new generation went forward with a strong sense of what it meant to be a woman in the 20th century, forging new paths for themselves and those who followed in their footsteps.
Drawn exclusively from the Museum collection, Women, Surrealism, and Abstraction endeavors to look beyond typical art historical boundaries and to begin to lay claim to a more holistic and complex view of art history—one that includes parties left out because of aesthetic biases based on a system of privileged white male patrimony.
This focused exhibition, drawn from the Whitney’s collection, will look at the creative and irreverent ways that seven artists—Ruth Asawa, Sari Dienes, Pati Hill, Kahlil Robert Irving, Virginia Overton, Julia Phillips, and Zarina—have employed the everyday objects around them to make prints.
While best known for her innovative wire sculptures, Asawa had a deep connection to drawing and painting and often depicted plants, flowers, and other organic forms across her work that spanned fifty years. Here, we present a selection of the artist’s smaller sculptures along with prints and works on paper, many of which have not been widely shown.
Displayed in this gallery are archival objects shown alongside works from the Museum’s Black Mountain College Collection, which is comprised of over 1000 artworks and ephemera. These objects create connections, each one a thread contributing to a nuanced tapestry of the people, materials, geographies, and ideas of Black Mountain College and its ongoing legacy.
Featuring over 100 works in ceramics, fiber, wood, metal, glass, and more unexpected materials, Crafting America presents a diverse and inclusive story of American craft from the 1940s to today, highlighting the work of artists such as Ruth Asawa, Beatrice Wood, Shan Goshorn, Nick Cave, and more.
The exhibition sets out to write the history of the contributions of women artists to abstraction, with one hundred and six artists and more than five hundred works dating from the 1860s to the 1980s.
This presentation highlights the affinity between Klee’s compositional approach and Asawa’s explorations of line and shape in works she created at Black Mountain College and in her first years in San Francisco, where she moved in 1949.
Organized by Helen Molesworth, this exhibition aims to situate Asawa’s (1926–2013) iconic looped- and tied-wire sculptures in the context of her extraordinary drawings and her lesser known sculptural forms, offering viewers one of the most comprehensive looks at this artist’s work to date.