Ruth Asawa’s Massive Retrospective Heads to Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
The first international showcase devoted to the full breadth of her life and practice.
Summary
- The Guggeneheim Museum Bilbao is set to host Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, after stops at MoMA and SFMOMA
- Opening in March, the exhibition covers six-decades of live and practice, from her upbringing in a Japanese internment camp to works completed in her home-studio in her final years
- Works on view include nature-inspired tied-wire pieces, clay and bronze casts, paperfolds, paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, lithographs and an abundance of her famed looped-wire sculptures
“An artist is not special,” the legendary Ruth Asawa once said. “An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.” Asawa, a West Coast favorite turned canon name, made work that changes the way we look at the elemental world and what it can teach us.
Following stops at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Ruth Asawa: Retrospective is set to land at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Open from March 19 through September 13, the showcase arrives on what would have been the artist’s centenary birthday, and what better way to celebrate than the first major museum exhibition to fully consider every aspect of her exquisite, groundbreaking practice.
Across ten sections spanning 1947 to 2006, the exhibition will trace the full breadth of her life and innovative practice, from an upbringing in Japanese internment camp, her time at the experimental Black Mountain College, to arts education and civic advocacy in the 1960s onward and notes from her home-studio. Works on view include nature-inspired tied-wire pieces, clay and bronze casts, paperfolds, paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, lithographs and an abundance of looped-wire sculptures, for which she is best known for.
Expansive and illustrious, the retrospective tempers Asawa’s art stardom with intimacy, felt through ephemera and archival photographs peppered throughout. In the decade following her death in 2013, appreciation for her work is on the up, and the showcase couldn’t have made better timing, inviting international audiences to venture into the unyielding curiosity and endless creative possibility of such an “artist” – in the truest sense of the word.
David Zwirner
David Zwirner
David Zwirner
David Zwirner
Head to the museum’s website to learn more about the exhibition.
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Abandoibarra Etorb., 2, Abando,
48009 Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spain
