The first thing that I noticed when we entered the David Zwirner gallery was that it was white. So, so, so white. Personally, white walls are my thing. I like the fact that other colors pop out against it (such as neon lights, dark typography, etc). I was already excited before I saw the art, and when I did, I realized the importance of having white walls for galleries. That was the first thing I learned on this class outing.
Secondly, I was surprised at how small, yet big, the gallery was. I hadn’t been to a lot of galleries, but most of them were really small. This one was divided into three rooms, and although those individual three rooms were really small, they all came together to form one giant masterpiece.
Onto the art now. I was stunned by each sculpture, to say the least. To think that Ruth Asawa sat there and created each loop by hand… (I’d guess there are hundreds, if not thousands of loops on a single piece… I’m also bad at guessing). It would take a serious amount of dedication and effort to create sculptures like those, and you can clearly see Asawa’s passion for art, for these lines.
Surprisingly, my favorite piece at the gallery was not one of the large, coil-y sculptures – it was this fractal like sculpture. I felt like this was a good reflection of Asawa’s determination to work with lines. From a distance, it looked like thin wooden sticks bundled together, but up close, you could see that it was still the theme of the gallery: bronze wires. There is something intricate about this piece, vaguely reminding me of something mythological – Celtic even. I saw the art was a casual progression of emotions and thoughts. What starts out as one thing (pick a starting point on the hexagon) spirals out into other emotion/thought, leading to an endless number of emotions/thoughts. I guess it could also represent the infinite number of possibilities there are in the world – kind of like how one action can lead to another thing, and it’s a snowball/domino effect, with the ends of the wires representing different possible outcomes.
Moreover, Ms. Eversley told us that art isn’t just viewed from a single perspective, which prompted me to start taking pictures of some of the coiled sculptures from the bottom up (which was kind of hard… I didn’t want to touch or god forbid, fall onto the art). A lot of the art looked similar from the standard view, but from below, it looked completely different. These two pieces were initially just spherical shapes within one another, and honestly, it didn’t really strike my interest. However, from a different view, it kind of looked funny. It reminded me of a steel wool scrubber (the ones you find in your kitchen to clean dishes and pans), especially because of its shape and texture.
This gallery exhibit was the first one that I’d been to and did analysis on. Given the reading prior to visiting the gallery, I felt more connected to the author. Obviously, I cannot relate to Ruth Asawa but I went to the gallery knowing the pain and struggles she went through, but despite that, she managed to find a way to express herself in art – through wires and lines.
