Ruth Asawa
A Retrospective

Ruth Asawa was animated by an irrepressible desire to break rules in subtle, elegant, concentrated, and meticulous ways. In this retrospective at MoMA, there are no contemporary dramas on display, none of the ubiquitous nods to politics or power. The galleries are suffused with a meditative silence that evokes the balance of a submerged world: stable, unperturbed, yet always and continuously alive and morphing. The experience is cathartic in unexpected ways. The driving force for the Californian artist of Japanese descent, who died just over a decade ago, was nature—but not the sublime nature of National Geographic documentaries or the romanticized landscapes of Friedrich and Constable. Asawa distilled natural forms and colours in ways that achieve an unusually incisive expressive depth, synthetic yet exuberant.

The path traced by the retrospective carefully and sensitively pieces together the portrait of an artist who escaped categorization, finding a surprising point of equilibrium between two seemingly incompatible poles: the structural mysticism of Hilma af Klint and the obsessive modular repetition of Yayoi Kusama. Asawa seems to have shared with af Klint the ability to read the natural world through the archetypal forms of plants, as though each line were the visible reflection of a larger, invisible principle. From Kusama, she inherited an attention to the reiteration of gesture, to the construction of rhythms through modularity. But whereas af Klint’s and Kusama’s overwhelming visions are rooted in psychological or cosmological registers, Asawa sought intensity through transparency: her work does not impose, it reveals. It is a bridge between worlds, a form of secular spirituality in which the disarming simplicity of a metal wire opens infinite perceptual dimensions.