When nothing else can: Ruth Asawa in Bilbao

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DATE

14 Apr 2026

AUTHOR

Maria Inês Mendes

When nothing else can: Ruth Asawa in Bilbao

AUTHOR

Maria Inês Mendes

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can. So said Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) in his poem Writing. He was referring to the post-war period, to a life on the margins amidst glasses of wine, beautiful girls, criminals, murderers and solitary madmen – and to the poetry that, even so, stubbornly continued to spring forth. In a different context, albeit one that is geographically and temporally close, Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) tells us something similar. Born in California to a family of Japanese immigrants, Asawa was sent to an internment camp as a result of US isolationist policies during the Second World War. It was at the Rohwer War Relocation Centre, aged 17, that she learnt to draw with three Disney animators – Chris Ishi, Tom Okamoto and James Tanaka – who were also imprisoned there. It was art happening when nothing else could.

Eight decades later, in the year marking the centenary of Ruth Asawa’s birth, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is hosting the first retrospective of the artist’s work in Europe. Curated by Cara Manes and Janet Bishop, the exhibition brings together a selection of works spanning the years 1947 to 2006. The premise of the exhibition is clear: to present her work comprehensively, reflecting not only the evolution of her visual grammar but also the deep intertwining of her artistic practice, her life and her community. Divided into ten sections, the exhibition follows a chronological structure, with some sections approaching an almost illustrative and didactic style typical of major museums. Yet whilst this chronology is evident, the exhibition remains particularly generous, making room for a careful observation that, in turn, reveals the complexity of Asawa’s work.

We enter the exhibition as if stepping into a shared space. Her work in the public sphere, in the city of San Francisco, serves as a starting point for understanding an artist committed to collaborative practices and education. We then proceed through the remaining rooms of the exhibition, designed by the architect Frank Gehry, where a forest of wire sculptures unfolds before us. We see undulating suspended forms, shapes within shapes, evoking the image of the snake from The Little Prince. Graceful, abstract and sinuous, they are also deeply tactile: on a human scale, casting shadows, flexible and in constant flux — “malleable as a basket, fine as a pencil line, loose as a net, strong as a fence, balanced as a bird in flight, gestural as a painting, fluid as a watercolour, open as a window screen, repetitive as an assembly line, unstable as a ballerina on her toes”¹.

These pieces form part of a body of work that the artist began following a trip to Mexico, where she first encountered a traditional basket-weaving technique. In the markets of Toluca, she observed vendors using this method to produce baskets—particularly egg-holding containers—and it was the transparency of the material, which she described as resembling “insect wings”, that fascinated her. From a continuous line of looped wire, she found a basic compositional unit that offered her countless formal possibilities. She began with simple forms and quickly discovered that, by closing these structures, she could make them grow inwards and outwards from themselves, overlapping them in almost infinite variations.

It was from this process that his great contribution to 20th-century abstract sculpture emerged: the idea of a continuous form within the form, a form with no fixed origin or visible end, in which the continuous wire surfaces function simultaneously as exteriors – like that of a sphere containing air – and interiors – like an air channel between two layers. It is a non-orientable topological surface, which would come to symbolise the concept of infinity in mathematics: exterior and interior, just like the positive and negative spaces that derive from them, exist simultaneously, in a single continuous gesture. It is precisely in this indistinction that part of the power of his work lies: the realisation that sculpture can unfold into multiple dimensions, being at once line, surface and volume. Only the proximity of the gaze can grasp this complexity, as the layers reveal and retract themselves, overlap and multiply.

Added to these pieces is a series of wire sculptures, constructed to resemble a desert plant. The compositions seem to spring from a centre — mutable in form, location and scale — from which structures of almost rhizomatic growth unfold. And, whilst the former used wire to construct a flexible mesh, the latter retains the material´s roughness and hostility, mirroring the austerity characteristic of the arid landscapes that inspired them. In the manner of Lacan, who reflects on the proximity between trauma and artistic production — the latter being a product of the former — these pieces are inscribed within this tension: the use of wire, far from being arbitrary, seems to accompany the artist through a process of mourning. While, on the one hand, this evokes the period of imprisonment to which she was subjected, on the other, it transforms into delicate forms, punctuated by small drops of dew. This is, here, a gesture of transfiguration of the trauma itself, reminding us that the tree — or the plant — is, in fact, the perfect sculpture.

The exhibition also features numerous drawings and silkscreen prints that similarly reflect this focus on the forms of nature. Diagnosed with lupus, a condition that significantly reduced her physical capacity, the artist developed, particularly from the 1990s onwards, a series of flower drawings, many of them inspired by the bouquets she was given and accompanied by short dedications. Closely linked to her personal life, this floral universe also refers to her relationship with her husband, the architect Albert Lanier, with whom she grew a garden in the house that served as her studio. Drawing emerges here as a persistent and intimate practice, a way of absorbing fragility and returning it in the form of lines as delicate as they are precise. It was drawing, in the end, happening when nothing else could.

This is how the exhibition presents Ruth Asawa’s world. Without regard for rigid hierarchies between disciplines, materials or media, her work crosses sculpture, drawing, craft and educational practice, dissolving the boundaries that art history has so often sought to establish. Whilst her work has sometimes been interpreted as decorative, this exhibition offers us another possibility: that of a practice which, like the continuous form within a form, is also organised in continuity. This, after all, is the purpose the exhibition fulfils: to show that Ruth Asawa was not merely interested in sculpture or painting, but in the total act of creation; to reveal the forms within forms—which is to say, the egg within the chicken, the art within life.

Organised in collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), the exhibition, currently on display at the Guggenheim Bilbao, can be visited until 13 September 2026.

UMBIGO travelled to the Basque city at the invitation of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

¹ Text by Cara Manes in the exhibition catalogue.

BIOGRAPHY

Maria Inês Mendes is is studying for a master's degree in Art Criticism and Curatorship at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. In 2024, she completed her degree in Communication Sciences at NOVA University Lisbon. She has written about cinema on CINEblog, a page promoted by NOVA's Institute of Philosophy. She is currently responsible for UMBIGO online, where she publishes regularly, and collaborates with BEAST - International Film Festival.

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