Created between 1953-54, the present work is a strikingly beautiful example of Asawa’s looped wire sculptures, one of her most iconic and beloved bodies of work. Marked by her typical claritys of line and form, Untitled (S.408, Hanging Five-Lobed, Two-Part Form, with the Second and Third Lobes Attached by Chain and Interior Spheres in the First and Third Lobes) integrates many key aspects of the artist’s practice: overlapping layers of looped metal wire; creative, contradictory play between light and shadow, opacity and transparency; and the incorporation of multiple interior spheres within exterior forms. Visually complex yet captivating in its material simplicity, the sculpture seems to float weightlessly in the air and epitomises Asawa’s skill in manipulating her chosen medium. “All my wire sculptures are made from the same loop,” Asawa has noted. “And there’s only one way to do it. The idea is to do it simply, and you end up with a shape. That shape comes out working with the wire. You don’t think ahead of t.mes , this is what I want. You work on it as you go along” (Ruth Asawa quoted in: Jacqueline Hoefer, “Ruth Asawa: A Working Life,” in Exh. Cat., San Francisco, Replica Handbags s Museum of San Francisco, The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, 2020, p. 36).

Each lobe in the present work transitions smoothly into the next, biomorphically alluding in form to organic phenomena such as seed pods or water droplets. It powerfully demonstrates how Asawa "was ahead of her t.mes in understanding how sculptures could function to define and interpret space. This aspect of her work anticipates much of the installation work that has come to dominate contemporary art" (Daniell Cornell in: Ashton Cooper, "Ruth Asawa's Late, Meteoric Rise from Obscurity," in BlouinArtinfo, 26 November 2013, online). Travelling to Mexico in 1947, she was especially attracted by how the metal mesh of looped-wire baskets enclosed space yet remained porous; as she noted, “What I was excited by was I could make a shape that was inside and outside at the same t.mes ” (Ruth Asawa quoted in: Karin Higa, “Inside and Outside at the Same t.mes ,” in Exh. Cat., San Francisco, Replica Handbags s Museum of San Francisco, The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, 2020, p. 52).

Following the bombings of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Asawa and her family were imprisoned in internment camps; she was not only a teenager, but also a US citizen by birth. At Santa Anita Assembly Center, she met professional artists and Disney animators who taught her to draw directly from nature. After graduating high school at Rohwer Relocation Center in 1943, she received a scholarship from a Quaker organisation that enabled her to leave the camp and persue a degree in art education at Milwaukee State Teachers College. She further pursued her interest in art by attending the legendary Black Mountain College from 1946 to 1949 where she studied under Josef Albers, Merce Cunningham and the environmentalist and architect Buckminster Fuller. These influential teachers and mentors emphasised the importance of expertise, community and learning as a social process.

Her drawings at Black Mountain explored repetition and pattern as informed by the observation of organic life, key themes across her diverse artistic practice that she would translate poetically across media. The lessons from Bauhaus expatriate Josef Albers were particularly important: "The lesson taught us by Albers was to do something with a material which is unique to its properties. The artist must respect the integrity of the material. I realized I could make wire forms interlock, expand, and contract with a single strand because a line can go anywhere, whereas a solid sheet is limited" (Ruth Asawa quoted in: Stephen Dobbs, "Community and Commitment: An Interview with Ruth Asawa," Art Education, vol. 34, no. 5, September 1981, p. 15). Perhaps more importantly, it was in her final months at the college that she cast off the racial and national labels of “American” and “Japanese,” instead pointedly identifying as a “citizen of the universe.”

The same year Asawa created the present work, the artist’s sculptures were presented in her first solo exhibition at the Peridot Gallery in New York. From this point, she “was interested in the economy of a line, enclosing three-dimensional space... I realized that I could make wire forms interlock, expand, and contract with a single strand because a line can go anywhere” (Ruth Asawa quoted in: Stephen Dobbs, "Community and Commitment: An Interview with Ruth Asawa," Art Education, vol. 34, no. 5, September 1981, p. 15). Asawa's work was recognised by major institutions early in her career. Her wire sculptures were shown in 1954 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, at the 1955 São Paulo Art Biennial and in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, Sculpture, Watercolors and Drawing in 1955, 1956 and 1958. In 1960 the de Young Museum in San Francisco presented a solo exhibition of her sculptures and works on paper. Taken together with her tied-wire, electroplated and cast sculptures, the present work attests to how Asawa achieved innovation through iteration, embracing the organic patination of her metallic wire medium as an important aspect of her oeuvre. In many ways, it is the perfect embodiment of Asawa’s enduring legacy as a creator of graceful, diverse and powerful art.