If you’re a celebrity with a penchant for interior design and a noteworthy art collection, it’s entirely possible — and very likely — that the inside of your home will be lovingly photographed as part of a magazine profile. Recently, this was the case with Gwyneth Paltrow, whose home was featured in Architectural Digest. And while that sounds like an eminently understandable pairing of publication and celebrity, what happened next took things in a much stranger direction.
As reported by ARTnews, an image of Paltrow’s home featured what looked a whole lot like a sculpture by the late Ruth Asawa. This, in fact, prompted critic Alexandra Lange to post about the presence of the sculpture on Twitter — only to have another writer, Marina Budhos, point out that the sculpture was not an Asawa original.
ARTnews reached out to David Zwirner, who represents Asawa’s estate. A spokesperson for the gallery responded with a short but unambiguous statement: “This work is not by Ruth Asawa.” Which begs the question: who was it by, then?
Architectural Digest eventually updated the article, crediting the sculpture to D’Lisa Creager — the artist who Budhos mentioned in her Tweet. Creager’s website mentions that she attended a workshop taught by Asawa’s daughter Aiko Cuneo a decade ago and began working with wire shortly thereafter.
Since then, Creager has been making art that is — shall we say — very, very reminiscent of Asawa’s wire sculptures. As Curbed pointed out, this is not the only sculpture by Creager that Paltrow owns — as of a few years ago, there was also one situated in Goop’s offices.
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