Ursula von Rydingsvard is a sculptor who has been working in Brooklyn, New York, for the past 30 years. Von Rydingsvard is best known for creating large-scale, often monumental sculpture from cedar beams, which she painstakingly cuts, assembles, and laminates, finally rubbing powdered graphite into the work’s textured, faceted surfaces. She deliberately uses cedar boards milled into 4″ x 4″ widths with varied lengths, giving her a neutrality or “blank canvas” which enables her to dip into a wide range of possibilities often within the arena of the psychological and emotional. Her signature abstract shapes refer to things in the real world—simple vessels, bowls, tools, and other objects—each revealing the mark of the human hand while also summoning natural forms and forces.
Born in Germany in 1942, von Rydingsvard and her family were among the dispossessed that, after the war, were forced to move from one refugee camp for displaced Poles to another, eventually settling in the United States in 1950. The artist’s respect for organic materials and the dignity of labor, the sense of loss and pain, and the persistent memories that inform her work may be traced back to these formative experiences. Ursula von Rydingsvard was born in Deensen, Germany, in 1942. She received a BA from the University of Miami, Coral Gables (1965), a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University (1975), and an honorary doctorate from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (1991). Von Rydingsvard’s sculpture is included in numerous permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Detroit Institute of Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She is the recipient of two individual grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation Fellowship, two awards from the American International Critics Association, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008, and was recently awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. The Sculpture Center in New York City presented a survey of her sculpture in Winter/Spring 2011 which traveled to the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, Ohio, and will travel to the Frost Museum in Miami, Florida. Also in 2011, Prestel published a monograph by Patricia Phillips on her work: Ursula von Rydingsvard: Working.
