Perez Art Museum, Miami, Dec 4 2013 to March 16 2014
Ai Wei Wei: According to What
You might also like:
Ruth Asawa: The Weightless Line
David Zwirner, New York, Sept 13 to October 21, 2017.
I’ve spent the afternoon in a forest made of wire.
Asawa’s signature hanging sculptures, those translucent, biomorphic lobes that seem to defy gravity. They don’t feel like “sculpture” in the traditional sense; they feel like drawings that decided to stand up.
The Geometry of a Shadow
The most mesmerizing thing isn’t just the wire itself, but the shadows they cast on the white gallery walls. Because the works are looped and nested, the shadows become secondary artworks. They look like cellular structures or ghosts of the pieces themselves.
Asawa once said she wanted to “enclose space without blocking it out,” and seeing these in person, you realize she achieved exactly that. They are there, but they are also empty.
Beyond the Wire
While the “baskets” get all the glory, the smaller room with her works on paper is also a revelation. I spent a long time looking at a piece made entirely from a “BMC” laundry stamp from her days at Black Mountain College. It’s a simple, repetitive mark that creates this undulating, textile-like pattern. You can see the DNA of her sculptures right there on the page, the obsession with the “economy of line” she learned from Josef Albers.
Notebook Thoughts:
- The Vibe: Surprisingly intimate for such a high-profile gallery. It felt like a “mini-museum” show.
- Key Takeaway: You don’t need to be loud to be powerful. These wires are thin, but they hold the entire room.
2026 Retrospective Note:
It’s wild to look back at this 2017 entry and remember how “new” this felt to the New York establishment. In 2017, this was David Zwirner’s first show after taking over her estate. It was a formal “re-introduction” of Asawa to the canon.
Fast forward to today, 2026, and Asawa is no longer an “overlooked” artist; she’s a cornerstone of 20th-century modernism. We’ve seen the massive MoMA retrospective now, and at SFMoMA and her prices have skyrocketed, but I still think back to this specific afternoon at Zwirner. It was the moment the art world finally stopped calling her a “craftsperson” and started calling her a master.
Yayoi Kusama, “I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers”
David Zwirner Gallery, New York, May 11 – Friday, July 21, 2023
Yayoi Kusama is one of Japanese Pop-Art’s leading lights, combining monumental works with a minimal, feminist, and conceptual blend of sculpture and painting. Her signature gesture is a field of dots, in the case of this show applied to monumental abstracted squash / biomorphic shapes. The effects range from bland to transcendent.
The New York Times comments on her instagram-perfect immersive scenarios:
“It’s a beautiful effect. (Or it was for me, alone in the room; you’ll be sharing the experience with up to three other visitors at a time.) But you needn’t be Dr. Freud to diagnose that the narcissism of a new selfie-devoted public has canceled, utterly, the goals of self-obliteration that Ms. Kusama intends her infinite installations to achieve. The self cannot dissolve when the selfie is the goal.”
Paolo Roversi Along The Way
Pace Gallery, New York, Sept 11 to 25 October, 2025
Paolo Roversi show in Pace’s focused retrospective, titled Along the Way, staged to coincide with New York Fashion Week and running mid-September through late October.
What surprised me, walking into it, was how little the show tried to “convert” the skeptical viewer. A lot of fashion photography in a white-cube gallery arrives with an apologetic posture: please notice the craft, please forget the client, please treat these as pictures not product. Pace mostly sidestepped that anxiety by leaning into Roversi’s real subject, which is not “fashion” so much as the conditions under which someone becomes image. The wall texts and selection emphasized collaborators and long relationships, which is the right frame for him. His best work is basically an extended study in trust, timing, and light.
[…]Georg Baselitz: “The Painter in his Bed”
Gagosian, New York, November 9–December 22, 2023
Georg Baselitz (born Hans-Georg Kern, 1938) is a German painter and sculptor, commonly known for painting his subjects upside down. He took this approach as a pivot in his career in 1969, with a show of inverted portraits that soon became his signature gesture.
This exhibit is series of neo-expressionist paintings, paired subjects of figures in a bed and inverted deer stags.
The compelling works featured in The Painter in His Bed focus on two motifs: figures in bed and the stag. Defining human and animal anatomy with raw expression, Baselitz negotiates apperception of these subjects through his distinctive painterly approach. Vigorously applying layers of paint, he affixes stretched nylon stockings and sheets of gauze across the upper parts of the paintings or makes monoprinted impressions of their shapes. With these additions, Baselitz extends the innovation of Springtime, his 2021 exhibition in the same space in New York. Dedicated to the spirited provocations of Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, and other Dadaists, the works in Springtime draw upon these artists’ irreverent introduction of everyday materials into the realm of art. Whereas many of the Springtime paintings are exuberantly colored, the new works are dominated by elemental contrasts of black and white.
Gagosian Gallery