A Visit to David Zwirner Gallery

Karolina Sotomayor
21 oct 2017
2 Min. de lectura

I got off work a bit earlier the other day to catch Ruth Asawa's show at David Zwirner Gallery and ended up seeing a lot more than I expected.

The Gallery's location on West 19th Street is currently presenting Paradise Lost by Chris Ofili, an installation comprised of four canvases painted in his notorious kaleidoscopic manner encaged by a wire fence, leaving only a strip of space to walk around the gallery. The work reflects on "themes of lost innocence, alienation, and desire." As you enter the gallery, your vision is struck as much by the lines as it is by the spectrum of white, gray and black that fills the room. A large area is left empty in the middle, leaving a deceiving sense of owning a space that in reality binds you to it.

I later made my way to the gallery's location on 20th street, where the Ruth Asawa show is about to close on October 22. Once again I was interrupted by an unexpected show of Ad Reinhardt's Blue Paintings on the first floor. The works done between 1950 and 1953 have only been shown together once before at the Stable Gallery, New York in 1965. Each painting is composed of blocks of different shades of blues, purples and greens. The tonalities are so close to each other that each painting requires you to stand in front of it and really unpack the boundaries of each shape.

On the second floor I finally found what I was looking for, Ruth Asawa's estate, recently acquired by David Zwirner Gallery. Asawa was an American sculptor of Japanese descent, whose artistic career began while being detained in an internment camp for Japanese Americans in California between 1942-43.

The pieces shown in this exhibition were inspired by a trip to Mexico, where she learned how to weave baskets. Since then, she created a body of looped-wire sculptures that play with the concepts of materiality, transparency and lightness. Each piece can stand on its own as well as within a group, creating all forms of movement and shadows, interlacing with each other and their surroundings.