Wire Sculpture - Modern Practitioners

Modern Practitioners

Artists such as Ruth Asawa, Gavin Worth, and others have further explored wire sculpture as an established medium.

Ruth Asawa came to prominence when her wire sculptures appeared at both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the 1955 Sao Paolo Art Biennial. Asawa learned to use commonplace materials from Josef Albers, her teacher at Black Mountain College, and began experimenting with wire using a variety of techniques.

In the 1950s, Asawa experimented with crocheted wire sculptures of abstract forms that appear as three dimensional line drawings. She learned the basic technique while in Toluca, Mexico, where villagers used a similar technique to make baskets from galvanized wire.

“I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It’s still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.”

In 1962, Asawa began experimenting with tied wire sculptures of images rooted in nature, geometry, and abstraction.

More recently, artist Gavin Worth has used wire sculpture to combine more realistic images with 3-d abstract forms. Worth approached Calder's idea of mobility in sculpture by making the viewer the mobile element. By placing varying images on different planes of the sculpture, the image changes as the viewer sees it from different angles, as shown by his small scale work, "And Light Fell on Her Face Through Heavy Darkness," and his large scale work, "Thirst."