Ruth Asawa Through Line

In a 1952 letter to Asawa, her friend and fellow artist Ray Johnson describes the composition of some of her looped-wire works as "forms within forms within forms." Asawa began experimenting with wire in 1947, and by the early 1950s she was creating the ambitious sculptures composed of nested, biomorphic shapes that inspired Johnson's letter. While making these works, such as the one on view here, Asawa found that "sculpture was just an extension of drawing."

These sculptures relate to her earlier drawings, including the curvilinear designs she had developed by observing dancers' movements at Black Mountain College and studying cellular structures in science courses there. These graphic explorations provided a generative motif Asawa could use to investigate positive and negative space, transparency, and figure-ground relationships. Over the years, she rendered "forms within forms" in washes of watercolor, stippled ink dots, screentone collages, and relief drawings on copper sheets.