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Ruth Asawa
The first European retrospective of Ruth Asawa, with wire and bronze sculptures, drawings, prints, paintings and public works.
Gehiago: Basilea
Room 7 holds the front doors of Ruth Asawa's San Francisco house: two massive redwood panels she carved in 1961, with her eldest children helping to blow-torch and wire-brush the relief. Beside them hang the life masks she cast from friends who came to visit. In Basel guests take their shoes off at the door; at the Asawas' they left a copy of their face.
This is the last stop of the first European retrospective, after San Francisco and New York. More than 200 works fill nine rooms off the foyer, from student drawings at Black Mountain College to the flowers of her last years. You walk between looped-wire sculptures, wire-mesh lobes nested one inside another, and wall pieces of tied wire that branch like roots.
It suits anyone who knows Asawa only from the hanging wire: much of the show is drawings, prints, watercolours and paintings. Entry is by timed ticket booked online, free up to age 25, and the museum stays open until 8 pm on Wednesdays.
Erredakzioaren aukera
Room 7 holds the redwood doors Ruth Asawa carved for her San Francisco house, beside life masks cast from visiting friends. Much of the retrospective is drawings and prints, a corrective for anyone who knows only the hanging wire.
Ez galdu
The redwood doors and life masks
Look for the carved doors of her Noe Valley home in Room 7, covered in entwined patterns, with the casts of visiting friends' faces hung beside them.
Three silver hanging forms
In Room 4 three looped-wire sculptures of seven, six and five tiers hang side by side in sterling silver, a metal she rarely used, their mesh opening into rippling windows.
The desert-plant sculpture
In Room 8 a tied bundle of galvanised wire splits into ever thinner strands, copied from a dried plant friends found in the desert after she failed to draw it.
Umakichi
Her 1965 lithograph in Room 6 shows her father frontally in a half-open kimono, his head framed by flowers and his dark face reading like a photographic negative.
Cherries in a Bowl
In the last room a small watercolour piles cherries so tightly that you fill in the glass bowl, which she never actually painted.
Norentzat
- Iluntzeko bisitak
- Xehetasun-zaleak
- Kanpoko bisitariak
Haurrekin
Children and young adults up to 25 get in free, though they still need a timed ticket booked online.
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- Yanik Soland: Walking on Rubber EggshellsPerformance von Yanik Soland mit Phoebe Bognár, Miriam Paschetta, Tomohiro Iino, Stefano Grasso und Larissa Rapold. Foto: Ivana Kresic © Kunsthaus Baselland
- Gili Tal: Light and AiryGili Tal, Light and Airy, exhibition view, Kunsthalle Basel, 2026, photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel
- Fondation BeyelerTaxiarchos228 / Wikimedia Commons