I will not be able to describe this Ruth Asawa's (1926-2013) retrospective better than it was done by Julian Lucas in The New Yorker (Nov.24, 2025) which you can read here.
These will be just some of my personal reflections.
I do not remember whether I first saw Asawa's sculptures - San Francisco museum of modern art? or was it in Crystal Bridges in Arkansas? The largest collection of her wire sculptures I saw before this retrospective at MoMa was in the exhibit at David Zwinger gallery in NYC in 2017. I was stunned by the amount of repetitive work put in all those sculptures. Seeing those works again in MoMa felt like meeting something familiar but no less impressive. What I learned now was that she had six children and she had them sometimes helping her. As she said in the video shown - "I had to figure out for them what to do." Ruth Asawa involved in making art not only her own children but she was teaching others too - that was mostly drawing and making sculptures. (More about that in the story I mentioned above).
Many times I was asked a question why I haven't created my hyperbolic crochet works in wire. I tried to crochet wire and it did not work. I know artists who have created crochet sculptures (Blanka Sperkova, Deanna Gabiga, for example) but working with wire wasn't for me.
Ruth Asawa had studied some geometry and that I have always felt in her works. In this show I found fascinating not only look at her sculptures but also to pay attention to shadows - this subtle movement from three dimensions to two and back, in some corners reflections were different projections.
This is Ruth Asawa's piece that has negative curvature
This one is very much like hyperbolic plane.
Another example of negative curvature
