Ursula von Rydingsvard

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 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.