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{"id":1526,"date":"2020-05-01T16:40:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-01T21:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/?post_type=compte-rendu&p=1526"},"modified":"2025-11-17T09:45:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T14:45:10","slug":"ruth-asawa","status":"publish","type":"compte-rendu","link":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/ruth-asawa\/","title":{"rendered":"Ruth Asawa
A Line Can Go Anywhere<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
At present, mired in the tumultuous particularities of our contemporary moment, so much to admire about Ruth Asawa \u2014 her work and her life, which were intertwined with organic and committed rigour. \u201cArt is doing. Art deals directly with life,\u201d said Asawa; and \u201csculpture is like farming. If you just keep at it, you can get quite a lot done.\u201d So she did, creating a huge body of work over more than half a century, much of which has only recently, since just before her death in 2013, gained widespread attention in the art world. A 1956 photograph taken by Asawa\u2019s friend, the photographer Imogen Cunningham, shows the artist in her studio with a vast array of her best known medium, intricate looped and tied wire sculptures, hovering behind her, suspended from the ceiling and affixed to the walls: a hint at the degree to which Asawa lived immersed in her work, a tireless and devotional manual practice.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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\"Ruth
Ruth Asawa 
<\/strong>Untitled (S.590, Hanging Open Undulating Form)<\/em>, c. 1960.
Photo : \u00a9 The Estate of Ruth Asawa, courtesy of The Estate of Ruth Asawa & David Zwirner, London<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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At David Zwirner, a large collection of these types of sculpture are on display, hanging in tensile groups of bronze, copper, brass, iron, and stainless steel, made from single, seem ingly endless strands that glint in the light and sway with the barest of breezes. Their shapes are both transparent and solid, shifting with each viewpoint, and it is tempting to affix formal associations \u2014 tree, womb, sea creature, mathematical equations mapped in space, wild geometric parabolas like modernist pavilions, flowers, dendrites, dandelion clocks, ghostly bodies. But this is the challenge of the work: to let it continue to grow and change inside the viewer, to resist linear and categorical readings, to push the mind further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A selection of Cunningham\u2019s portraits hang near the sculptures, including a now well-known photograph of Asawa working in the studio with four of her six children playing alongside, large looped oblongs of nested orbs within orbs dangle overhead and in between \u2014 seductive, intimate, dazzling, austere. Asawa spent her adulthood in San Francisco, integrating her family life with her studio practice, and engaging actively in her arts education in her local community. While these details have often been used to interpret Asawa\u2019s practice as related to the maternal, domes-tic, and craft-oriented, they have avowedly more to do with an embrace of process and practice as ideology: that how<\/em>, not necessary what <\/em>one makes is tantamount, and structurally revelatory of one\u2019s role as a citizen in society. For Asawa, who learned these critical positions during her studies at Black Mountain College, community, patience, rigour, and the infinite continuing line were ideals to live by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A Line Can Go Anywhere <\/em>takes its title from a quotation by Asawa, in which she describes the ability of the line to contain space while maintaining openness. The exhibition closes with a series of spare ink drawings of daisies, lilies, roses, and chrysanthemums. These works echo the sculptures, continuing and transforming their sinuous lines so that the forms read as at once distinct and interchangeable: everything is connected. An idea that soothes and encourages in troubled times \u2014 though what you do with it is up to you.<\/p>\n\n\n
Emily LaBarge, Ruth Asawa<\/div>\n
Emily LaBarge, Ruth Asawa<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David Zwirner,<\/strong> London
U.K. January 10 \u2013 February 22, 2020<\/br><\/br>","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1405,"template":"","categories":[884],"numeros":[231],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[756],"artistes":[1321],"thematiques":[],"type_compte-rendu":[],"class_list":["post-1526","compte-rendu","type-compte-rendu","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","numeros-99-plants","auteurs-emily-labarge","artistes-ruth-asawa"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu\/1526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/compte-rendu"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1526"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=1526"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=1526"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=1526"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=1526"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=1526"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=1526"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=1526"},{"taxonomy":"type_compte-rendu","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_compte-rendu?post=1526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}