Christie’s is proud to present its second survey exhibition dedicated to one of America's most talented artists of the 20th century, Ruth Asawa. This exhibition titled Line by Line, focusing on the interrelationship between the artist's drawings and sculptures, follows the great success of the Objects & Apparitions exhibition held in 2013 at Christie’s, Asawa’s first comprehensive exhibition in New York in over 50 years.
Ruth Asawa has lived a rare and unique life as an artist. Her life, like her art, has been shaped by social and political impositions, unjust restrictions on her liberties and supposed inalienable rights. As a teenager in the early 1940's,
Asawa and her family were sent by Executive Order to an internment camp along with approximately 120,000 fellow Japanese-Americans. Under the tutelage of professional artists who were also held captive in the camps, Asawa began exercising freedom through her art while the government stripped her of her civil liberties. Despite the suffering she endured. Asawa exhibited great humility and harbored little resentment more than fifty years after the event, saying, "I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am."
On a journey to Mexico in the summer of 1947, Asawa was captivated by the looped-wire baskets used in markets to sell eggs and other produce. Intrigued with wire as an exploratory medium for her own studies, she began to loop
and twist wire in a similar fashion. Asawa began creating three-dimensional forms that played with their surrounding space using one continuous line made of wire. These looped wire sculptures with their multi-layered exterior and interior forms invoke a sense of wonder that immediately turns to a curiosity about how they were made. These sculptures rely on the language of transparency that is associated with the formulation of modernism and design promoted by the Bauhaus.
View the Objects & Apparitions 2013 Catalogue >