Sculptor Ursula Von Rydingsvard Dies At 84

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Ursula von Rydingsvard, a sculptor renowned for her monumental cedar creations that blended organic forms with a human sensibility, died on Tuesday in New York at age 84. Her death followed a battle with Alzheimer's disease, according to The New York Times.

Von Rydingsvard frequently utilized 4×4 cedar beams to construct towering works that often appeared to undulate and shift, at times seeming almost alive. She began working with cedar in the mid-1970s, a period when Minimalism dominated the New York art scene. This prevailing style often featured imposing steel and metal sculptures. Von Rydingsvard, however, found its theory-driven and“cold sensibility” unappealing.

She once told curator Mark Rosenthal, who organized her 2018 exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia,“There was no sexiness, and there wasn't even any humanity.” Although she learned to weld, finding the process“more frustrating than imaginable,” as she recounted to critic Jason Farago, she discovered a technique she preferred: using a hot rod on steel sheets to create delicate, organic droplets.“The heat made the sheet organic in a beautiful, delicate way,” she said.“That I liked.”

The painter Michael Mulhern introduced von Rydingsvard to cedar 4x4s, which she then sliced in a metalworking studio. She found delight in creating“forms that felt like the earth, or felt fleshy,” as she described. Critic Rachel Wetzler noted in Art in America in 2018 that“The wood's standardized format offsets the primordial qualities of her sculptures, which loosely suggest, among other things, fossils, rocky canyons, or cresting waves; her best works tend to exploit the animating tension between the underlying gridded structure of the stacked wood and the ragged, irregular forms she unearths.” She specifically favored 4x4s over tree trunks, explaining that trunks“retain their form too well.” She said,“These are neutral. They don't ask anything of you. They're like a blank piece of paper.”

Her material repertoire expanded to include silk, hair, and cow intestines, which she sculpted into large-scale objects that maintained a sense of elegance despite their size. Some critics drew connections between her art and her personal history, such as in Zakopane ( 1987 ), a work featuring wood sacs and spiky protrusions, named after her mother's Polish birthplace. Von Rydingsvard maintained that the link to her lived experience was implicit. She told Farago,“I have this feeling that I have this strong link to a past that I never experienced, the peasant farmer past. Not that I want to experience it; I never asked for it. But it sort of runs through my blood, whether I want it or not.”

Born in Deensen, Germany, in 1942, von Rydingsvard was the daughter of Polish and Ukrainian peasant farmers. Her father was conscripted by the Nazis and forced into a labor camp. After World War II, her family lived in a displaced persons camp in Germany before relocating to Plainville, Connecticut, in 1950. There, her mother worked in a restaurant and her father in a factory, also assisting on an adjacent farm. Von Rydingsvard later worked at her mother's restaurant and described her upbringing as distinctly blue-collar, recalling that in Plainville,“there was no such thing as an artist.”

She pursued higher education at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Miami, Coral Gables, earning her bachelor's and master's degrees, respectively. After moving to Oakland, California, with her first husband, Milton von Rydingsvard, with whom she had a daughter, Ursula Anne von Rydingsvard, she divorced him in 1973. She then moved to New York with her daughter and enrolled in Columbia University's art program. Living on food stamps in a“dangerous” apartment on 125th Street in Harlem, she found being a single mother in her early 30s to be liberating. At Columbia, she was influenced by critic Max Kozloff's lectures on Marcel Duchamp and studied with art historian Meyer Schapiro and artist George Sugarman.

Upon graduating in 1975, she established a studio in a SoHo loft. In 1981, she moved to Brooklyn, where she remained for the rest of her career. In 1985, she married neuroscientist Paul Greengard, who died in 2019. Her sculptures have been widely exhibited at venues such as Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York and Yorkshire Sculpture Park in England. As her recognition grew, she undertook increasingly ambitious commissions.

In 2013, she unveiled Ona ( 2013 ), a 12,000-pound, 19-foot-tall sculpture of rippling cedar blocks located beneath the oculus of Brooklyn's Barclays Center. Its title translates to“she” or“her” from Polish. She welcomed physical interaction with her work, telling The New York Times at Ona's debut,“I would actually love people to touch it. The acid from fingers polishes it, like the Buddhas getting their bellies rubbed.” However, she also expressed concerns about improper preservation, wanting her art to endure permanently. She told Farago,“I don't want my work to rot. Even after I'm gone.”

Source: ARTnews

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