The Ruth Asawa exhibition at Fondation Beyeler (Riehen/Basel, Switzerland) is the first major European retrospective of the American artist of Japanese descent (1926–2013). It runs ctober 18, 2026–January 10, 2027, and is the final stop of a major international tour.

It is an exhibition partnership between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. The show features roughly 200 works spanning Ruth Asawa’s six-decade career: her signature suspended looped-wire sculptures (delicate, biomorphic, hanging forms made from continuous loops of wire), bronze and other sculptures, drawings, prints, paintings, paperfolds, and material related to her public commissions (fountains, murals, memorials). It emphasizes the interplay between these media and how she blurred boundaries between abstraction and figuration, art and craft, and action and contemplation.

Ruth Asawa studied at the experimental Black Mountain College in the late 1940s under figures including Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and Merce Cunningham. She settled in San Francisco from 1949, where she raised six children with her husband Albert Lanier while producing her distinctive wire sculptures (influenced in part by traditional basket-weaving techniques she encountered in Mexico), autonomous drawings, and later public works. She was also a prominent advocate for arts education in the Bay Area.

Ruth Asawa Retrospective at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen (Basel, Switzerland). Press Preview, October 16, 2026.