The work of Ruth Asawa is considered one of the major artistic rediscoveries of recent years. The versatile oeuvre of the American artist with Japanese roots includes wire and bronze sculptures, drawings, prints, paintings, and public artworks. In her delicate wire sculptures, she transformed a simple, everyday material into fascinating three-dimensional objects, collapsing the boundaries between art and craft, and between action and contemplation. Alongside these, she created works on paper that move between figuration and abstraction.

The catalogue for the exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler—the artist's first retrospective in Europe—presents her work in German for the first time. The exhibition was initiated by SFMOMA, San Francisco, and MoMA, New York, where it was first shown. More than 200 works in various media demonstrate the material and conceptual spectrum of her practice, in which transparency and tactility, lightness and discipline form a poetic alliance. The abundant visual material is accompanied by art-historical essays that introduce the artist's work and situate her practice within the context of postwar American art.

Ruth Asawa (1926 in Norwalk, CA-2013 in San Francisco, CA) studied at the legendary Black Mountain College starting in the late 1940s, learning from teachers including Josef Albers, who became a mentor to her. It was there that she met her future husband, the architect Albert Lanier. In 1949, she moved with him to San Francisco, where she began creating her extraordinary, delicate wire sculptures. Alongside her artistic work, she and Lanier raised six children together. Starting in the 1960s, Asawa realized numerous public commissions, such as fountains and memorials, and was a driving force behind arts education in schools throughout the California Bay Area.