Ruth Asawa
LOT 27
Untitled (P.001, Tied-Wire Sculpture Drawing), 1995
Ink on French rag paper, etching, Edition 53 of 100, signed
26.5 x 22.25 in. (unframed)
Courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. and David Zwirner
Suggested retail value: $16,000
Starting bid: $12,000
About the Artwork
American artist, educator, and arts advocate Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) is known for her wire sculptures that challenge conventional notions of material and form through their emphasis on lightness and transparency. Born in rural California, Asawa first studied art while detained in incarceration camps for Japanese and Japanese Americans at Santa Anita, California, and Rohwer, Arkansas, where she was sent with her mother and five of her siblings in 1942-43. Following her release, she enrolled in Milwaukee State Teachers College, then made her way to Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1946. Asawa's time at Black Mountain proved formative in her development as an artist; she was particularly influenced by her teachers Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and the mathematician Max Dehn. For more than 60 years, she participated in San Francisco’s civic life, and created an extensive body of work that includes prints, drawings, paintings, sculpture, and public commissions. In 1962, two of Asawa’s friends gifted her a desert plant and asked her to draw it. To understand the plant’s structure, she first sculpted it out of wire–this work, printed by Magnolia Editions in Oakland, evokes a universal geometry viewed contemplatively from the earth, an instant multiplied infinitely in all directions. Asawa was awarded a 2022 National Medal of Arts by President Joe Biden in 2024, only the second visual artist to receive this high honor posthumously. The first international institutional and posthumous survey of the artist’s work, Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, is currently on view at SFMOMA.
HOW TO BID:
Bidding is available from May 18-June 5.
1) Text 'READY TO BID' or call 628-237-8195.
OR
2) Visit Headlands' Auction Exhibition to see the artwork and bid via pen & paper.