Cover image courtesy Pieternel van Velden
Images clockwise from left:
Image courtesy of OMA
Left: Mishka Henner, Feedlots, 2013. Right: Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London, 2018. Photo: Luca Locatelli
Your work sits somewhere between real and imagined landscapes, it feels almost like memory that never actually happened. Are you trying to reconstruct something, or escape it?
I begin my work from landscapes I have experienced. Rather than simply reproducing what I see, I try to re-examine the atmosphere of a place and the layers of memory embedded within it from multiple perspectives, and to reconstruct a landscape on the canvas. I am less interested in reconstruction than in the process by which fragments of memory and landscape transform over time. By valuing the feeling of “something that seems real,” I believe this is a way of approaching reality.
You’re working with painting and ceramics, both very physical, material processes. How important is the idea of touch and texture in your practice?
It is very important. Touch and texture carry information that cannot be captured by vision alone, giving a sense of time, weight, and resistance to the work. Like clouds in the sky, ripples on water, or peeling paint on a wall, the natural world is full of abstract phenomena that never repeats itself. By finding scenes within them, I feel that our sensibilities are shaped along the way.
Designing staff uniforms with Stone Island means your work becomes something people wear, move in, and work in. Does it lose something in that translation, or does it gain a different kind of life?
Rather than losing something, it feels like a shift into a different context. When worn, the work is no longer fixed, but changes along with movement and environment. I see this as a kind of extension.
Uniforms usually erase individuality, but your work is very personal and intuitive. Did you try to resist that, or lean into it?
Instead of being completely uniform, I hope subtle differences emerge depending on the person who wears it.
Your work often explores natural phenomena and imagined landscapes, where do these worlds originate from for you?
They originate from memories of landscapes and natural phenomena I have observed, which gradually merge and transform over time.
More broadly, how do you see the relationship between art, function, and everyday use in this kind of collaboration?
I see art, function, and everyday life not as separate, but as continuous. In this kind of collaboration, I find interest in how those boundaries gradually dissolve.
Frieze Week returns to The Shed in Hudson Yards of New York. From May 13th-17th, browse over 65 galleries spanning 26 countries and discover today's most compelling artist within New York's vibrant and irreplaceable art scene spirit.
"Womanizer" - a word visually literally dominated by “woman”, yet by definition focused on a male character, defining how males manipulate multiple women for sexual gain - is an accurate notion of the patriarchy which Capozzi dismantles through her work. She takes back this word and through her redefinition, Womanizer solely focuses on what it means to be female, both challenging and leaning into societal standards. Her lawless compositions find celebrities juxtaposed against the mundane, suburbanites against the surreal. Her art clashes absurdity and elegance, naturalism and idealism. These pairings work to disrupt the legacy of the male gaze and in place establish the female point of view. Her involvement to create dreamlike, spontaneous, feminine worlds uplift the raw, fierce, and playful emotions that exist innately and uniquely underneath the structured and polite female persona.
The exhibition will include eight large scale prints and a series of eight unique polaroids featured in the book. The opening reception and book signing on May 14th will run from 5-8 p.m. at 113 Eldridge St, New York, NY 10002. Womanizer will stay open to view during the same hours until the 23rd, with the book available for purchase.
Bilbao’s Guggenheim is maybe an ideal setting for an artist so deeply concerned with space, movement, and form. Asawa’s work sits among other legendary names: Jenny Holzer, Yayoi Kusama, Rothko, Richard Serra’s gargantuan steel structure hovering nearby. Yet her sculptures feel entirely their own; her signature hanging forms, made from brass, copper, and bronze wire appear almost weightless. Often untitled, unnamed, and without obvious formula, they move with light and air despite their industrial materials. Still, there are repeated motifs: visually emulating woven baskets and craft weaving, her suspended forms use endless loops of wire to create “forms within forms,” often resembling cells, fruit, flowers, or planets suspended in space.
And in the exhibition there is a deeper appreciation of Asawa’s life and artistic principles. Born to Japanese American farmer parents, Asawa was busy from childhood, balancing schoolwork with life on the family farm whilst holding a strong work ethic from youth. During World War II, her family was forcibly placed in Japanese American internment camps under the Roosevelt administration, she and her siblings becoming separated from their father during the process. But even in the midst of her detainment she kept making, and her creativity was never separate from labour; she took life drawing classes and was inspired by the practice of fellow detainees, some of whom had worked as animators for Disney. She sourced any materials she could find— discarded rubber sheets, leaves even— to make her art.
It was only in later years she would become introduced to the looped wire technique she is widely known for, spending a summer in Toluca, Mexico, where she would take to traditional woven baskets sold at a craft market. But what makes the retrospective especially powerful is its attention to Asawa beyond the now-iconic wire sculptures. The exhibition offers a vision of Asawa as a woman whose private life was intimately reflected in her art, speaking to the age-old tussle between art, womanhood and motherhood and how she overcame it
For Asawa, the two were never separate. Her work was not made despite domestic life, but through it, with family, children, and home forming as part of the practice itself. Pieces drawn from her later years in San Francisco intimately bring her private life into focus and reveal the breadth of her multidisciplinary practice: paintings, drawings, prints, and notably clay and bronze casting. There are children’s feet cast in bronze, such as that of her grandson Henry, as well as casts of her own tools, her hands. Asawa famously plaster cast the faces of people in her home studio at the kitchen table, usually taking to a subject if she thought they looked interesting. And littered across the exhibition are some selections of those thousands of faces she cast in her lifetime. The artist once said that “an artist is someone who can take ordinary things and make them special.” It feels like both an artistic principle and a metaphor for her life.
Asawa spent much of her career defying the boxes placed around her— racism, wartime incarceration, discrimination, and the tendency to overlook women artists whose work was seen as too domestic or decorative. At the Guggenheim Bilbao, Ruth Asawa’s work feels both delicate and radical in reminding us how she turned those assumptions inside out. It reminds us that form does not need formula, and that the most powerful art can come from repetition, domesticity, and the refusal to stop making.
