Ruth Asawa described her looped-wire sculptures as a way of taking a two-dimensional line into three-dimensional space. Her technique grew from seeing basket makers work with wire during a 1947 trip to Mexico. Back in the United States she developed that looping process into suspended forms built from ordinary industrial materials such as iron, copper and brass wire. In a work from around 1958 now in SFMOMA’s collection, a continuous mesh expands and contracts into nested lobes while remaining transparent enough for the room to pass visually through it.
That transparency may be the most interesting material in the sculpture. Traditional sculpture often defines a solid mass against surrounding emptiness. Asawa gives the emptiness a shape of its own. Light and shadow complicate it further: the wire produces another changing drawing on nearby surfaces. A sculpture can therefore occupy space without filling it. The object and the air inside it become equally necessary.
