Wire Ruth Asawa’s Pieces of Art so Wonderous?

After a treacherous walk to the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, we arrived at the Ruth Asawa exhibit. Yingzhi and I had a lengthy conversation about  I thought it was interesting to learn about her past before coming to see her artwork in person. I had no idea who Ruth Asawa was before coming to this gallery, but her past was very fascinating. In her interview with Stephen Dobbs she spoke about her interest in music, but her family was too poor to afford music lessons so she became interested in art. She spoke about her family being in internment camps very casually and how she began to study art. It was interesting to read how she went from having an interest in painting and drawing to sculpting with wire. When Asawa spoke about sculpting with wires in the interview I wasn’t sure what she meant.

     The gallery was not what I expected, it was a lot smaller than I thought it would be. I had never visited this gallery before so I expected a bigger building with many more art pieces.

I was immediately attracted to all the hanging wire sculptures in the main room, I didn’t know what to expect. I instantly thought about Christmas ornaments, everything was hanging from the ceiling similar to how ornaments would hang from a Christmas tree. Asawa’s artwork made me think about all the upcoming holidays. I was impressed at how detailed and intricate each individual sculpture was, each wire carefully woven into the next wire. Every sculpture was very geometric, focusing on many shapes such as circles, ovals, triangles and squares. I didn’t know such beauty was attainable with just wires. Each piece was meant to be observed from all different angles, no angle produced the same view.

    My favorite pieces of artwork were the two star-like sculptures, both untitled. These two caught my eyes the most because of how they highly resembled snowflakes. Both have very intricate designs and when you look up close you can see each wire being intertwined with the next. The ends of the sculptures look very much like twigs. I compared these two pieces to snowflakes because if anyone were to try to reproduce these two pieces it would never look exactly the same as the original and no two snowflakes are alike. These two pieces of artwork are my favorite because they also remind me of the winter time and the holidays that are coming up.

Overall, I really adored this gallery. I thought each piece in it’s own was very astonishing. I was shocked to learn that the prices of the artwork in the gallery ranged from $30,000 to $2.5 Million. I’m sure whoever buys the artwork gets their money’s worth because the pieces Ruth Asawa created are truly amazing.

Photos taken from the David Zwirner Gallery website