Ursula von Rydingsvard
  • Thursday, February 19, 5:00pm – 7:00pm: Opening reception Saturday, February 21, 3:00pm: Panel discussion with Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Eric Booker,...
    Ursula von Rydingsvard
    Untitled, 2024-25
    Cedar
    123 x 109 x 90 in (312.4 x 276.9 x 228.6 cm)
    (GL17276)

    Thursday, February 19, 5:00pm – 7:00pm: Opening reception
    Saturday, February 21, 3:00pm: Panel discussion with Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Eric Booker, Susan Unterberg, and Kennedy Yanko

    Galerie Lelong, New York, is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by the esteemed sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard, presenting recent works in the artist's signature medium, cedar, alongside a selection of new drawings. Known for her monumental sculptures that are grand in scale but intimate in their details, von Rydinsgvard takes a highly intuitive, personal approach to her work, her dedication to the act of making paramount in her practice. Of her drive, the artist explains "[I make art] because I don't want to be doing anything with my life—that the building of my art work feels like the most consequential thing I could be doing with my time." Through her painstaking processes of cutting and assembling, standardized industrial wood beams are transformed, reinvigorated with organic, supple energy and emotional charge. This exhibition coincides with Ursula von Rydingsvard: states of becoming at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, which surveys the past two decades of the artist's creative output, featuring large-scale works in wood and charting the evolution of her practice in paper.

    Central to the gallery exhibition is an arched sculpture standing nearly eleven feet tall; created in 2024-25, this is the most recent work on view and introduces a new image in her vocabulary. Here, von Rydingsvard's marks in cedar take on a new configuration, demonstrating her ceaseless urge to evolve within her practice and extend the possibilities of her material. Instead of textured orifices, her repetitive cuts deepen to create finger-like forms that extend upwards from the surface of the sculpture. These spindles pulse with exuberance, invoking frenetic energy against the solidity of the arch structure. This new motif first emerged in an untitled wall-based work created in 2024, on which the artist traced the outline of her own hands—a figurative translation of the touch of the artist ever-present in her works, which are never fabricated by machine despite their monumental scale and traditionally industrial material.

  • Throughout the works on view, von Rydingsvard suffuses her forms with a dynamic sense of motion, despite their steadfast solidity...
    Ursula von Rydingsvard
    Untitled, 2022
    Cedar
    95 x 32 x 32 in (241.3 x 81.3 x 81.3 cm)
    (GL16920)

    Throughout the works on view, von Rydingsvard suffuses her forms with a dynamic sense of motion, despite their steadfast solidity in space. In ALL THE CHILDREN I NEVER HAD (2018-24), she revisits the bowl-like shape that has recurred throughout her work over decades, crafting three separate forms that meld into each other, with the lip of the last extending like the crest of a wave. A freestanding columnal sculpture created in 2022 twists as it rises from the ground. This sculpture is envisioned as a work in bronze, and its cedar model is on view at the gallery. Von Rydingsvard has increasingly explored the formal possibilities of bronze in recent decades. She begins with a full-scale wood model, allowing her to engage the same hands-on process of cutting to form organically textured surfaces, before casting in metal and varnishing with a hand-painted patina.

    Though von Rydingsvard is best known for her commanding, large scale sculptures, drawings have become an increasingly important aspect of her work. A selection of intimately scaled drawings in charcoal and graphite on paper is on view in the small gallery space, in conversation with a new sculpture. For the artist, who foregoes the use of sketches in her sculptural practice, these drawings stand as a separate but connected forum for continued exploration of depth and space and her interior imagination.
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