Ruth Asawa, Aoki, from 1965. Photo: Brian Karl for Observer

Like facing the still tableau of a vast aquarium, or flashing on a silent scene in a science fiction film starring elegant alien lifeforms, viewers entering “Ruth Asawa: Retrospective” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are confronted with a series of striking, uncanny wire sculptures—half-familiar yet not wholly ungraspable. These sculptural creations, meticulously woven from brass, copper, iron and steel, have a friendly quality: curious, open, sympathetic. They embody a paradox, too, made, as they are, of mostly empty space—air itself—as much as the mesh contours that outline their porous borders but do not entirely contain them.

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This expansive array of Asawa’s work begins its tour at SFMOMA before moving on to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain and the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland. The many wire sculptures, along with a wealth of Asawa’s drawings, paintings and lithographs and a wide range of associated artifacts, documentation and memorabilia, highlight her career-long creation of alternative possibilities for how we might imagine built structures and even life itself, inspired by and borrowing from the larger environment. Produced using disparate materials and multiple creative disciplines for impressively crafted feats of engineering, Asawa’s work nearly always also demonstrates connections to phenomena from the natural world, suggesting glimpses of some underlying matrix of organic infrastructure. Extending the sense of created space even further, hinting at alternate worlds beyond the immediate, perceivable physical realm, prominent shadow versions of each form play out on walls next to which most of the sculptures are suspended from the ceiling.

The wire sculptures range in size from just an inch or two in diameter to over ten feet in height. In a striking instance, the elongated Untitled (S.250, Hanging Seven-Lobed Continuous Interlocking Form with Spheres in the First, Fifth and Sixth Lobes)—one of her earlier pieces (circa 1955)—casts an overall aspect like an especially tall humanoid figure with a sort of extra-large eyeball-filled head. The woven iron and galvanized steel wire forms elegantly show signs of gravity’s pull in layered fashion, with its globular components overlapping and sometimes nestled inside others.

It is perhaps no surprise that Asawa’s most colorful works are painted, drawn and printed images taken most directly “from nature.” For example, 1975’s ink on paper Desert Flower, with its multiple hues of green stemming from a symmetrical brown branching center, suggests a realistic depiction of a real plant, though it is in actuality an abstract synthesis of how structures form when plants grow rather than representative of any specific flora. Many of Asawa’s wire works follow similar principles of invented abstract forms that suggest biomorphism without being directly drawn from life models.

Take, as another example, Untitled (S.731, Hanging........

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