The interest of Ibram Lassaw in abstraction in the 1930s began with Constructivist drawings. However, it was the English language version of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s The New Vision, and several articles on “Universal Architecture” by Buckminster Fuller that gave Ibram Lassaw a framework for understanding this new art. The importance of Moholy-Nagy’s book to Ibram Lassaw was for its illustrations of the tactile experiments conducted at the Bauhaus that suggested new materials and sculptural processes. Buckminister Fuller opened up new perspectives for Ibram Lassaw because Fuller discussed the similarities between architectural design and natural systems such as trees and the human body. Between 1933-1934, Ibram Lassaw started to create open-space abstracted sculpture, made from plaster on wire armatures. The sculptor had already experimented with abstracted forms in the previous years.

Beginning in 1933, Ibram Lassaw became involved with the Works Project Administration (WPA) Federal Arts Project and similar organizations. In addition, the artist briefly worked for the Public Works of Art Project cleaning sculptural monuments around New York City. In 1936, Ibram Lassaw co-founded American Abstract Artists, and later served as the organization’s president from 1946-1949. During this time, Ibram Lassaw was working with a broad range of materials, maintaining his interest in untraditional media, particularly those that referenced technology, such as steel and iron. The works of Ibram Lassaw from this period vary from ornate and baroque to rectilinear and precise.

By the late 1930s, the artist moved from plaster and wood on wire to sheet metal and hammered forged steel. Around 1937, Ibram Lassaw began constructing sculpture. From an old refrigerator motor, the artist improvised brazing tools and began to build frameworks with iron rods. To these structures, which he also painted, Ibram Lassaw connected carved white wooden shapes. Three of these open-space works by Ibram Lassaw: Sculpture (aka Pot Jumping Through Hoop) (1935), Sculpture (1936), and Sing Baby Sing (1937) all made using plaster and wire, were exhibited at the first group show of the American Abstract Artists at the Squibb Gallery in 1937. At the 1938 annual exhibition of the American Abstract Artists, Ibram Lassaw showed a series of shadow boxes, shallow wooden containers holding plaster-coated wire, mesh, and free-form organic shapes that were lighted with electric bulbs. In these works, the artist sought a formal balance between geometric and organic form.

Much of the experimentation of Ibram Lassaw during the 1930s focused on process–finding appropriate methods to express dual respect for space and “truth to materials.” The sculptor gave up plasterwork, as it was too fragile for open-form sculpture. Ibram Lassaw briefly tried liquid latex, which for a variety of reasons, including its smell, was unsatisfactory. Along with the abstract artist Getrude Greene, Ibram Lassaw bought a forge and attempted using a hammering steel, but he found the results excessively two-dimensional.

In the 1940s, Ibram Lassaw began concentrating on rectilinear shapes. When he exhibited a steel and plastic sculpture entitled Intersecting Rectangles in the 1941 American Abstract Artists exhibition, the artist Piet Mondrian encouraged him to proceed along ‘Neo-plastic lines.’ During the next several years, Ibram Lassaw experimented with geometric, Constructivist spatial configurations, often combining steel with plastic and Lucite. While each approach offered intriguing possibilities, none enabled the sculptor to work freely and intuitively. However, his artistic focus was interrupted by army service; from 1942 to 1944, Ibram Lassaw served in the U.S. Army in Virginia, where he also learned to weld while fixing army vehicles.

Beginning in 1946, following the discharge of Ibram Lassaw from the army, the artist created a series of hand-painted “projection paintings.” These miniature Abstract Expressionist paintings applied to 2×2-inch glass slides, when viewed through a projector, cast an array of colored-light images. Unlike abstract paintings, which could be rotated on the wall and viewed from four different perspectives, the “projections” by Ibram Lassaw could be rotated and turned around, offering the viewers eight different possible vantage points. By 1949, Ibram Lassaw stopped producing these paintings and devoted himself almost entirely to sculpture, but he would revisit the medium later in life.

After the war, the return to sculpture by Ibram Lassaw also marked his departure from purely geometric shapes to biomorphic forms. He began integrating other materials, such as plastic and Plexiglas, and also adding dye to the sculpture to integrate color. In 1949, Ibram Lassaw became one of the founders of The Club, which was an informal but influential discussion forum of New York School artists that included Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.

A breakthrough came for the artist in 1950. In a sculpture entitled Milky Way, Ibram Lassaw dripped melted plastic over a wire armature. Although neither aesthetically pleasing nor durable, Milky Way nonetheless marked the future direction of the sculptor. Following the direction of Milky Way, he welded rods into open-form architectonic structures, then encrusted the surfaces with droplets of metal. By using different alloys within the same piece, Ibram Lassaw achieved remarkable variations in color, which he also enhanced through chemical treatment. With a sculpture like The Hyades (1951) Ibram Lassaw found methods and materials that integrated biomorphic and geometric form while enabling him to work freely and intuitively.

By the early 1950s, Ibram Lassaw owned and used oxyacetylene welding equipment, and identified the ideal medium for his signature style of molten metal; creating a sculpture “drop by drop,” a method in which the red-hot metal, brought to varying degrees of temperature and consistency, was carefully directed through a funnel-like device. The resulting product was a kind of spontaneous and instinctive sculpture similar to the action painting of his New York School peers.