Curated by former MOCA LA Chief Curator Helen Molesworth, “Ruth Asawa: All is Possible” at David Zwirner, New York expands our understanding of this remarkable artist by presenting a selection of lesser-known pieces together with her iconic sculptures. Asawa’s drawings, in particular, with their scenes of family members, chairs, flowers and plants, describe the rich life of creativity Asawa enjoyed despite the prodigious responsibility of raising six children.

These tranquil pieces reveal so much about Asawa’s practice, character and life. Initially, they may appear a departure from her sculptures, but line is the unifying element. Asawa’s crisp botanical sketches seem to emerge from one assertive line and the single wire from which each sculpture is created, evokes a line. Asawa embraced this, likening fashioning her sculptures to drawing in air. In her hands line becomes a dazzling filament that bends and turns to form a metal loop or glides boldly across a sheet of paper to render petals and leaves.

Suspended from the ceiling, Asawa’s sculptures evoke the organic—jellyfish bells or seaweed stalks, a cascade of ruffles. Asawa weaves the wire into her distinctive looping mesh to produce a continuous surface which includes interior and exterior shapes.

Eight sculptures hang together in one room. The interplay between the shapes and forms of the works commands the space. One is drawn to how the sculptures inhabit the air, claiming the negative space around them and expanding beyond their physical boundaries to include the shadows they cast.

Ruth Asawa, Untitled (MI.066, Chair with Double Looped Back), c. 1950-1959. Private Collection © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner

With her drawn meanders, Asawa takes a linear pattern and repeats it across the page in a similar manner to her sculptures, building upon a single motif to create, through repetition, something substantial. For Asawa, the repetitive nature of the work was possibly meditative, providing a portal into deeper concentration and taking her out of her busy maternal reality for a time.

Over 50 bisque-fired lifemasks of friends and family members confront you en masse from one wall. Beautifully rendered in terra cotta, white, bone and black, this assemblage of humanity is profoundly moving.

Asawa operated in the traditionally feminine realm of weaving and sketching domestic scenes, creating work of remarkable heft and muscle. She was no wuss. Her sculptural work required enormous patience and stoicism, as entwining the metal wire was a tedious process that shredded her fingers. She carved enormous doors from redwood planks that have such simple, yet imposing beauty, that they rival the most magnificent bronze versions.

Continuing to make art as the house filled with kids must have been exceedingly challenging. Asawa’s work lent itself to being made on the fly during stolen moments, using simple at-hand materials. She was ideally suited for this, having, in addition to her obvious artistic gifts, the fortitude and resourcefulness, forged in the internment camps she inhabited as a teenager, to make the best out of any situation. That this paradigm of inventive multitasking also achieved such transcendent beauty, shows us that for her, all really was possible.