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It hardly seems possible that there could be a major 20th-century artist still ripe for rediscovery, but so it seems with the Japanese-American sculptor Ruth Asawa (1926-2013). Her work comes as a complete surprise, and not only because she has never been shown in this country before. Everything Asawa made was so original, and fashioned mainly out of wire – an art of pure visual joy.
Born in rural California, Asawa’s first exposure to art teaching came when her family and other Japanese-Americans were detained in internment camps during the second world war. After hostilities ended, she studied art at the famously experimental and non-hierarchical Black Mountain College in North Carolina. She began with ink drawing, both figurative and abstract. But in 1947, a Mexican craftsman taught Asawa how to weave baskets out of wire, and this knowledge inspired her own unique structures.
The sculptures are exquisite, aerial, suspended from the ceiling. Enter the David Zwirner gallery, and before you hover all sorts of new forms. Some have a kinship with lanterns, spherical domes, or intricately latticed windows. Others have more affinity with flight, fanning into wings, airborne seeds or shivering tendrils. They are so diaphanous that a passing breeze can set them revolving in motion.
A winter tree hangs in space, its branches like splintering black lines. The analogy with drawing is evident, and poetic, but this wire form just keeps on proliferating. Asawa ties wire to wire to wire, twisting them into 360 degrees, so that her sculpture becomes a thicket of smaller trees, growing both over and under the ground, as it seems. A tree and a world of trees: a planet of forests.
The corners of a Japanese helmet lift to the skies. A pinecone grows into a spiky leaf, which in turn becomes a miniature fir. One basket seems to nestle inside another – oval inside sphere, like an egg newly laid in a nest, yet all of it is radiantly transparent. The wire is knotted, twisted, or turned like crochet; it loops like knitting; or it meshes like the warp and weft of loose weaving. Every sculpture openly shows its own workings.
Marvellous photographs by her friend and contemporary, the great Imogen Cunningham, show Asawa at work in the studio with bales of wire, and quite often some of her six children (as if to imply this might be child’s play, which it emphatically is not). For her technical dexterity remains almost beyond belief, especially in the larger works. An ethereal concatenation of interconnected spheres, containing smaller orbs, descends from the ceiling to the floor. Mesh through mesh, reprised, creates an effect of twinkling light. And you peer in, as if to discover a butterfly unfolding within its chrysalis.
A sphere may gather associations of all sorts into its shining shape – a hot air balloon, a Christmas decoration and a deep-sea urchin, all jauntily combined. One work, flat to the wall but in three dimensions, resembles a whole hawthorn hedge twisted into a snowflake-cum-star. Asawa’s tied-wire sculptures have a special extra frisson, each of the knot formations bristling like a burr.
Her sculptures, the artist wrote, sometimes came from simply being in her own garden observing “the spiral shell of a snail, seeing light through insect wings, watching spiders repair their webs in the early morning”.
But they also emerge from the drawings – and vice versa. It would be hard to think of another sculptor, except perhaps Giacometti or Alexander Calder, whose works had so much interconnection with their graphic work.
Asawa’s drawings are stunning, the precise clarity of the line mimicking the tensile wires from which her sculptures are worked. She takes your eye deep into the centripetal complexity of a chrysanthemum, turning this humdrum plant into a maze of delicate forms. The mysterious structure of an iris is investigated in a black ink drawing that celebrates each of its origami folds. Irises are so often described in paint, mainly in terms of blurred colour, but who needs colour when a monochrome drawing can convey such light and hue. As with sculpture, Asawa made drawing her own.
She relishes the fine prickles on a stem, like a modern Dürer. But her drawings also have the poise and virtuosity of the sculptures. In one image, dots of pollen that seem to have escaped from the centre of a flower gather, like pinprick starlings, into the buzz of an insect – the bee that will help produce the next blossom. There is such wit in her art.
Another undervalued artist – the Indian modernist Benode Behari Mukherjee (1904-80) – is presented alongside Asawa at David Zwirner. His collages are lithe and curious, quizzical cats and human figures in a jubilant pageant of colour and Matissean form, which maintain an extraordinary sense of balance. Mukherjee was blind by the time most of these were made: his celebratory intellect is apparent in the extraordinary touch of his fingertips.
It is good to see this radical art retrieved from the past, brought to light in a new era. In the case of Asawa, who dedicated much of her life to educating others, and whose modesty is so beautifully apparent in the subtle grace of her works, it seems entirely possible that her method ran against her. For so long, anything associated with domestic craftsmanship, from stitching to weaving to basketry, led to marginalisation. But as with the weaver Anni Albers, Asawa is finally getting her due. The public arts high school she opened in San Francisco in 1982 has finally been named after her. Another exhibition of her work opens at Modern Art Oxford in May, travelling to Norway later this year. But for now, this superb show takes flight in the mind – once seen, never forgotten.
Star ratings (out of five)
Ruth Asawa: A Line Can Go Anywhere ★★★★
Benode Behari Mukherjee: After Sight ★★★
• Ruth Asawa and Benode Behari Mukherjee are both at David Zwirner, London, until 22 February
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