upside down
This tree is upside down.
A stem of a tree becomes smoother the higher you look. With Mocna by Ursula von Rydingsvard this is the other way around.
With Mocna we see the oldest part of the stem upside down above the ground. We only see the oldest part of the tree, where the youngest branche once begun. You see the past of the tree.
Ursula von Rydingsvard turns our usual perspective around. We see the older and the past. How would it be for us? What feeling comes up from the memories of our childhood? Which memories did we want to forget? Which comforting experience appeared to be essential to our later life?
I was shocked when I saw Mocna for the first time. Mocna has lead me to ask arduous questions about my past. I need time to repeatedly hear the questions and to give a sensed answer. Only than I can look at Mocna again with peace of mind.
By Theo, www.artatsite.com
Vertaling
verkeerd om
Deze boom staat verkeerd om.
Een stam van een boom wordt steeds gladder, hoe hoger je kijkt. Bij Mocna van Ursula von Rydingsvard is dit andersom.
Bij Mocna zien we het oudste gedeelte van de stam verkeerd om boven de grond staan. We zien alleen het oudste gedeelte van de boom: waar de jongste stam ooit begon. Je ziet het verleden van de boom.
Ursula von Rydingsvard draait ons gebruikelijke perspectief om. We zien het oudere en het verleden. Hoe zou dit zijn voor ons? Welk gevoel komt op bij de herinnering van onze jeugd? Welke herinnering wilden wij vergeten? Welke troostrijke ervaring bleek essentieel voor ons latere leven?
Ik schrok toen ik Mocna voor het eerst zag. Mocna heeft mij ertoe gebracht om lastige vragen te stellen over mijn verleden. Ik heb tijd nodig om deze vragen herhaaldelijk te laten klinken en een doorvoeld antwoord te geven. Pas daarna kan ik Mocna met een gerust hart opnieuw bekijken.
Door Theo, www.artatsite.com
www.genevaanderson.wordpress.com:
'Mocna' means strong in Polish. Yesterday morning, as I was driving by Stanford’s stunning Denning House, which will house a new art collection, I caught my first glimpse of Ursula von Rydingsvard’s newly-installed 17-foot-tall bronze sculpture which lives up to its name. With its gnarls, ripples and lace-like pierced openings at the top, 'Mocna' reminded me of the latticed Banyan trees, at Ta Prom, Angkor Wat, which have taken hold of the temples with a fierce, intractable grip and integrated themselves into the stone itself. The piece is prominent but, because of its naturalistic look, in certain light, it might easily be mistaken for a large tree trunk. At 10 a.m., a few people had stopped to photograph 'Mocna' and a worker lay on the ground installing lights along the path leading up to Denning House. The view from here is 'great,' he said, adding that the installation process had been 'intense.'
Ursula von Rydingsvard, 76, a Brooklyn-based artist who Germany to Polish and Ukrainian parents, is known for her monumental works which are in the permanent collections of over 30 international museums and on view in multiple public locations across the country. Several of her artworks are titled in Polish. I was first introduced to her at the 2015 Venice Biennale, where six of her magnificent sculptures were installed at the Giardino della Marinaressa, a public park set on the main route between the Giardini and Arsenale, which has a marvelous view across the water to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. This was her first exhibit in Italy and her majestic works evoking rippled old tree trunks were integrated into the natural canopy of trees in the park. Three were assembled from actual cedar beams; two were cast bronze sculptures; and one was a work in ice-blue resin cast from cedar. Her works are easily recognizable. In recent years, she has tried to move away from pure cedar, instead creating bronze and resin casts from cedar originals.
'Mocna' was commissioned as the inaugural work in Denning House’s art contemporary collection, which plans to acquire one piece every year from emerging and established artists poised to make a lasting impact in the arts. Denning House and its art collection were enabled by a gift from Roberta Bowman Denning and her husband, Steven A. Denning, MBA ’78, past chair of the Stanford Board of Trustees. Denning House will serve as a hub for the Knight-Hennessy Scholars as they pursue their graduate work in departments across campus. Ennead, the architectural firm behind Bing Concert Hall and the Anderson Collection building, designed the building.
The Knight-Hennessy Scholars program is largest fully-endowed scholars program in the world, named for alumnus Philip H. Knight, MBA ’62, philanthropist, American businessman and co-founder of Nike Inc., and former Stanford President John L. Hennessy, who served as the university’s 10th president from 2000 to 2016. Knight-Hennessy Scholars receive the full cost of a graduate edat any of Stanford’s seven schools. The first cohort of scholars will begin graduate studies in fall 2018.
While 'Mocna' is the first commissioned piece in the new collection, Denning House has also acquired two works by the artist Trevor Paglen: 'Matterhorn (How to See Like a Machine) Brute-Force Descriptor Matcher; Scale Invariant Feature Transform' (2016) and 'Lake Tenaya Maximally Stable Extremal' (2016). These dye sublimation prints consider the ways that machines understand images, and the gap between recognition and understanding.
Paglen’s work is displayed on both floors of Denning House and can be seen on one of the monthly tours of the building, which will begin in the spring. Mocna can be viewed anytime on the north side of Denning House.
Von Rydingsvard will visit Stanford next month for 'Mocna’s' formal dedication and will gave a talk about her work.
www.news.stanford.edu:
Mocna, a 17-foot bronze sculpture with interior lights, was installed in front of tanford University. The sculpture is the first artwork in the new Denning House Collection, which plans to acquire one new piece every year from emerging and established artists poised to make a lasting impact in the arts. Denning House is home to the university's Knight-Hennessy Scholars program, which offers full funding and leadership development training to select graduate students in departments across campus.
Von Rydingsvard’s large-scale abstract work – Mocna is an impressive 17 feet – reveals both the traces of the human hand and the forces of nature in its bronze structure. Her art is represented in the permanent collections of over 30 museums and is on view in multiple public locations across the country.
'Von Rydingsvard’s use of bronze transcends traditional processes, incorporating metallic fretwork and internal LED illumination. Positioned at the threshold of Denning House, the monumental work commands the attention of those who enter,' said Susan Dackerman, the John & Jill Firector at the Cantor Arts Center. 'Mocna joins a distinguished collection of sculptures at Stanford, including one of the largest collections of works by Rodin in the U.S. at the Cantor.'
www.news.rice.edu:
Sculpture, von Rydingsvard said, is a medium much like poetry: full of meanings and metaphors that can be understood differently on each approach and by each person who views it. But her most important advice for appreciating all art is the same.
www.listart.mit.edu:
The studio of Ursula von Rydingsvard is a constant hum of activity and inquiry. Each new work continues and confirms a depth and persistence of process—and presents new directions and challenges.
Paradoxically both tempestuous and contemplative, the artist, clothed in protective gear, quietly draws exquisite wandering lines on pieces of cedar that are assembled to make evocative forms whose exposed surfaces are scored and lacerated in a cacophony of the screeching blades of circular saws. Each new work builits precedents, yet reveals in its process of becoming an enduring commitment to emergent and often difficult new ideas and directions. Often beginning with the conformities of milled, 'ready-made' cedar beams, new and unprecedented variables are coordinated in a wildly persistent yet inherently searching process. Her unconventional methodology was not taught and has been discovered and honed through a deep, intuitive intelligence formed through experience, observation, repetition, inquiry, and concentration.
Von Rydingsvard’s work has a distinctive and energetic form yet a constitutively enigmatic, often unrevealed character. It is formally and conceptually complex, neither overtly joyous nor filled with darkness or despair. It exists ambiguously yet forcefully between abstraction and representation with registers that often prompt nuanced, unsettled, and open response. The artist’s prolific and adaptive public work has been sited, either permanently or temporarily, in sculpture parks, urban plazother spaces, but it is installations of her work on college and university campuses that stimulate particularly associative and contextual readings and experiences. The work engenders an expressive dialogue with its local and expanded environments of structures of and passions for knowledge and inquiry.
She recently installed a major new work, Uroda (2015), made of thousands of copper elements in front of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. In time, the copper will age, oxidize, and acquire new and vivid colors in response to water and weather at the site. And now at MIT, one of the first universities to establish an ambitious public art program for its remarkable confederation of researchers, teachers, and students, she has installed the bronze sculpture Scientia (2016) in front of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
Born in 1942 in Deensen, Germany, von Rydingsvard is the fifth of seven children of a Polish mother and Ukrainian father. As a young child enduring the deprivations of World War II, the defeat of Germany and the end of ghastly conflict did not offer respite or relief. Her family became part of a wandering tumult of disposed Poles moving from one refugee camp to another between 1945 and 1950 in post-war Germany. With early childhood memories sealed in her consciousness and somatic recall, over many years as a New York City-based artist she has developed a courageous sensibility for the unknowns of material experimentation and extraordinary applications. But even new works of bronze, polyurethane resin, or copper generally emanate from her deep attraction to wood and legendary use of pliable cedar as a point of origin.
There is a traceable line between her vivid memories of being uprooted and homeless—and her evocative use of wood. In postwar refugee camps she sought security in provisional wooden barracks rapidly assembled to provide rudimentary forms of shelter for displaced people. She pressed her body against the wooden walls feeling t protective textures while inhaling the smell of the wood. In conditions of extremity, the wood offered a vital, renewing animism to a bewildered and frightened young child. A descendant of Polish farmers, perhaps these experiences also summoned images of enormous wood piles, homes and tools made of wood that are an enduring source of ideas and inspiration for the artist.
In 1950, the artist’s family boarded a ship in Bremerhaven, Germany that sailed to the United States and they eventually settled in Plainville, Connecticut. Von Rydingsvard attended public school and assisted her parents with the work and maintenance of the family.
She recalls discovering art and imagined what it would be like to be an artist, yet never believed that this could be possible. In college in Florida she studied art education and taught in public schools for nine years in different locations. Ultimately she abandoned the securities of teaching and employment to move to New York with her three-year-old daughter. She founa small loft on Spring Street, which she purchased with her life savings from school teaching, raised her daughter, often subsisted on food stamps and odd jobs, and pursued a Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University. As a sculpture student she spent most of her time welding, but near the conclusion of her program she was introduced to milled cedar—four inch by four inch by eight feet lengths—whose responsive vascular structure has animated her artistic practice for forty years.
It is not surprising that early life encounters of displacement and poverty have annealed a constitutive resourcefulness and her legendary work ethic. Although she often draws and makes small objects that present themselves equivocally yet stoically as eccentric, functionally ambivalent tools and artifacts, the epicenter of the work is large-scale cedar sculptures (which are often the original and first generation of monumental works of bronze, copper, and other materials) assembled and stacked into thick forms that are cut, ed, and agitated with circular saws operated by studio assistants known as 'cutters.' Like the laboratory of a scientist engaged in collaborative research and experiments, von Rydingsvard’s studio has a small, loyal family of assistants who work with her to navigate technical and conceptual questions and enter the unknowns and uncertainties presented by each new work. With the artist, they are a dedicated community who help to advance often challenging aesthetic experiments. Yet there is genuine conviviality in the demanding work; no matter how pressing the deadline or daunting the task, each day they all break for a shared lunch at the rough wooden table in the studio’s small kitchen, often including guests who may be visiting.
Von Rydingsvard’s work for the McGovern Institute is a striking and compelling embodiment of the intricacy of aesthetic form as metaphor or surrogate for the cellular and visceral, electrical and chemical infrastructure of the human brain. Functioning like the cranial caprotects the brain, von Rydingsvard frequently utilizes and continues to push to its limits ypology, forms, technology, and meaning in the inner spaces of enormous vessels or bowls that contain, protect, and mysteriously withhold. The genesis of Scientia is a narrow base and foundation constructed of cedar elements that have been assembled, cut, and incised to create a gradually and gracefully opening and unfolding vessel that leads to a dramatic summit—a magnificent, lace-like bronze crown. The expansive work is 25 feet tall (and the artist’s largest work to date.) First a full-scale cedar sculpture, once completed in the artist’s Brooklyn studio, it was shipped to Polich Tallix Foundry in Rock Tavern, New York to be cast in bronze. Yet its ultimate embellishment of five feet of an open, lattice-like bronze crown was developed through drawings and refinements by the artist and her own work on wax molds for this fantastic cast element.
Art is a genuine and generous, if often challenging invitation tl with its forms and ideas through our own restive processes of conviction and doubt. The creations of von Rydingsvard are agents of inquiry that dynamically and dialectically present and withhold meaning. It is within the liminal spaces of mystery and possibility that we encounter the palpable bonds of different forms of knowledge - and a deep desire of discovery - as indicative features of the human experience.
www.wikipedia.org:
Ursula von Rydingsvard (born 26 July 1942) is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.
Von Rydingsvard was born in Deensen, Germany in 1942 to a Polish mother and Ukrainian father. As a young child, the artist and her six siblings experienced the German occupation of Poland and the trauma of World War II, followed by five years in eight different German refugee camps for displaced Poles. In 1959, through the U.S. Marshall Plan and with the assistance of Catholic agencies, her family of peasant farmers boarded a ship to the United States where they eventually settled in Plainville, Connecticut. She received a BA and MA from University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida in 1965 and an MFA from Columbia University in New York City in 1975. In the late 1970s, she was part of NYC's Cultural Council Foundation Artists' Project, which was funded under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (Ceta).
Major permanent commissions of her work are on view at the Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA; Storm King Art Center, New York; the Bloomberg Building, New York; the Queens Family Courthouse, New York; the Nelson-Atkins, Kansas City, and the Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York. Mad. Sq. Art: Ursula von Rydingsvard was the outdoor solo exhibition presented at Madison Square Park in 2006.
In 2008, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters along with being featured in Art:21 Art in the Twenty-First Century on PBS. A monograph on her work titled The Sculpture of Ursula von Rydingsvard was published by Hudson Hills Press in 1996 and in 2011 Prestel published Ursula von Rydingsvard: Working. In 2014-2015 Ursula von Rydingsvard had her first British show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (West Yorkshire, UK), her most extensive exhibition to date. The exhibition was accompanied by the Ursula von Rydingsvard 2014 Catalogue, a major publication featuring text by Molly Donovan, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington."
This tree is upside down.
A stem of a tree becomes smoother the higher you look. With Mocna by Ursula von Rydingsvard this is the other way around.
With Mocna we see the oldest part of the stem upside down above the ground. We only see the oldest part of the tree, where the youngest branche once begun. You see the past of the tree.
Ursula von Rydingsvard turns our usual perspective around. We see the older and the past. How would it be for us? What feeling comes up from the memories of our childhood? Which memories did we want to forget? Which comforting experience appeared to be essential to our later life?
I was shocked when I saw Mocna for the first time. Mocna has lead me to ask arduous questions about my past. I need time to repeatedly hear the questions and to give a sensed answer. Only than I can look at Mocna again with peace of mind.
By Theo, www.artatsite.com
Vertaling
verkeerd om
Deze boom staat verkeerd om.
Een stam van een boom wordt steeds gladder, hoe hoger je kijkt. Bij Mocna van Ursula von Rydingsvard is dit andersom.
Bij Mocna zien we het oudste gedeelte van de stam verkeerd om boven de grond staan. We zien alleen het oudste gedeelte van de boom: waar de jongste stam ooit begon. Je ziet het verleden van de boom.
Ursula von Rydingsvard draait ons gebruikelijke perspectief om. We zien het oudere en het verleden. Hoe zou dit zijn voor ons? Welk gevoel komt op bij de herinnering van onze jeugd? Welke herinnering wilden wij vergeten? Welke troostrijke ervaring bleek essentieel voor ons latere leven?
Ik schrok toen ik Mocna voor het eerst zag. Mocna heeft mij ertoe gebracht om lastige vragen te stellen over mijn verleden. Ik heb tijd nodig om deze vragen herhaaldelijk te laten klinken en een doorvoeld antwoord te geven. Pas daarna kan ik Mocna met een gerust hart opnieuw bekijken.
Door Theo, www.artatsite.com
www.genevaanderson.wordpress.com:
'Mocna' means strong in Polish. Yesterday morning, as I was driving by Stanford’s stunning Denning House, which will house a new art collection, I caught my first glimpse of Ursula von Rydingsvard’s newly-installed 17-foot-tall bronze sculpture which lives up to its name. With its gnarls, ripples and lace-like pierced openings at the top, 'Mocna' reminded me of the latticed Banyan trees, at Ta Prom, Angkor Wat, which have taken hold of the temples with a fierce, intractable grip and integrated themselves into the stone itself. The piece is prominent but, because of its naturalistic look, in certain light, it might easily be mistaken for a large tree trunk. At 10 a.m., a few people had stopped to photograph 'Mocna' and a worker lay on the ground installing lights along the path leading up to Denning House. The view from here is 'great,' he said, adding that the installation process had been 'intense.'
Ursula von Rydingsvard, 76, a Brooklyn-based artist who Germany to Polish and Ukrainian parents, is known for her monumental works which are in the permanent collections of over 30 international museums and on view in multiple public locations across the country. Several of her artworks are titled in Polish. I was first introduced to her at the 2015 Venice Biennale, where six of her magnificent sculptures were installed at the Giardino della Marinaressa, a public park set on the main route between the Giardini and Arsenale, which has a marvelous view across the water to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. This was her first exhibit in Italy and her majestic works evoking rippled old tree trunks were integrated into the natural canopy of trees in the park. Three were assembled from actual cedar beams; two were cast bronze sculptures; and one was a work in ice-blue resin cast from cedar. Her works are easily recognizable. In recent years, she has tried to move away from pure cedar, instead creating bronze and resin casts from cedar originals.
'Mocna' was commissioned as the inaugural work in Denning House’s art contemporary collection, which plans to acquire one piece every year from emerging and established artists poised to make a lasting impact in the arts. Denning House and its art collection were enabled by a gift from Roberta Bowman Denning and her husband, Steven A. Denning, MBA ’78, past chair of the Stanford Board of Trustees. Denning House will serve as a hub for the Knight-Hennessy Scholars as they pursue their graduate work in departments across campus. Ennead, the architectural firm behind Bing Concert Hall and the Anderson Collection building, designed the building.
The Knight-Hennessy Scholars program is largest fully-endowed scholars program in the world, named for alumnus Philip H. Knight, MBA ’62, philanthropist, American businessman and co-founder of Nike Inc., and former Stanford President John L. Hennessy, who served as the university’s 10th president from 2000 to 2016. Knight-Hennessy Scholars receive the full cost of a graduate edat any of Stanford’s seven schools. The first cohort of scholars will begin graduate studies in fall 2018.
While 'Mocna' is the first commissioned piece in the new collection, Denning House has also acquired two works by the artist Trevor Paglen: 'Matterhorn (How to See Like a Machine) Brute-Force Descriptor Matcher; Scale Invariant Feature Transform' (2016) and 'Lake Tenaya Maximally Stable Extremal' (2016). These dye sublimation prints consider the ways that machines understand images, and the gap between recognition and understanding.
Paglen’s work is displayed on both floors of Denning House and can be seen on one of the monthly tours of the building, which will begin in the spring. Mocna can be viewed anytime on the north side of Denning House.
Von Rydingsvard will visit Stanford next month for 'Mocna’s' formal dedication and will gave a talk about her work.
www.news.stanford.edu:
Mocna, a 17-foot bronze sculpture with interior lights, was installed in front of tanford University. The sculpture is the first artwork in the new Denning House Collection, which plans to acquire one new piece every year from emerging and established artists poised to make a lasting impact in the arts. Denning House is home to the university's Knight-Hennessy Scholars program, which offers full funding and leadership development training to select graduate students in departments across campus.
Von Rydingsvard’s large-scale abstract work – Mocna is an impressive 17 feet – reveals both the traces of the human hand and the forces of nature in its bronze structure. Her art is represented in the permanent collections of over 30 museums and is on view in multiple public locations across the country.
'Von Rydingsvard’s use of bronze transcends traditional processes, incorporating metallic fretwork and internal LED illumination. Positioned at the threshold of Denning House, the monumental work commands the attention of those who enter,' said Susan Dackerman, the John & Jill Firector at the Cantor Arts Center. 'Mocna joins a distinguished collection of sculptures at Stanford, including one of the largest collections of works by Rodin in the U.S. at the Cantor.'
www.news.rice.edu:
Sculpture, von Rydingsvard said, is a medium much like poetry: full of meanings and metaphors that can be understood differently on each approach and by each person who views it. But her most important advice for appreciating all art is the same.
www.listart.mit.edu:
The studio of Ursula von Rydingsvard is a constant hum of activity and inquiry. Each new work continues and confirms a depth and persistence of process—and presents new directions and challenges.
Paradoxically both tempestuous and contemplative, the artist, clothed in protective gear, quietly draws exquisite wandering lines on pieces of cedar that are assembled to make evocative forms whose exposed surfaces are scored and lacerated in a cacophony of the screeching blades of circular saws. Each new work builits precedents, yet reveals in its process of becoming an enduring commitment to emergent and often difficult new ideas and directions. Often beginning with the conformities of milled, 'ready-made' cedar beams, new and unprecedented variables are coordinated in a wildly persistent yet inherently searching process. Her unconventional methodology was not taught and has been discovered and honed through a deep, intuitive intelligence formed through experience, observation, repetition, inquiry, and concentration.
Von Rydingsvard’s work has a distinctive and energetic form yet a constitutively enigmatic, often unrevealed character. It is formally and conceptually complex, neither overtly joyous nor filled with darkness or despair. It exists ambiguously yet forcefully between abstraction and representation with registers that often prompt nuanced, unsettled, and open response. The artist’s prolific and adaptive public work has been sited, either permanently or temporarily, in sculpture parks, urban plazother spaces, but it is installations of her work on college and university campuses that stimulate particularly associative and contextual readings and experiences. The work engenders an expressive dialogue with its local and expanded environments of structures of and passions for knowledge and inquiry.
She recently installed a major new work, Uroda (2015), made of thousands of copper elements in front of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. In time, the copper will age, oxidize, and acquire new and vivid colors in response to water and weather at the site. And now at MIT, one of the first universities to establish an ambitious public art program for its remarkable confederation of researchers, teachers, and students, she has installed the bronze sculpture Scientia (2016) in front of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
Born in 1942 in Deensen, Germany, von Rydingsvard is the fifth of seven children of a Polish mother and Ukrainian father. As a young child enduring the deprivations of World War II, the defeat of Germany and the end of ghastly conflict did not offer respite or relief. Her family became part of a wandering tumult of disposed Poles moving from one refugee camp to another between 1945 and 1950 in post-war Germany. With early childhood memories sealed in her consciousness and somatic recall, over many years as a New York City-based artist she has developed a courageous sensibility for the unknowns of material experimentation and extraordinary applications. But even new works of bronze, polyurethane resin, or copper generally emanate from her deep attraction to wood and legendary use of pliable cedar as a point of origin.
There is a traceable line between her vivid memories of being uprooted and homeless—and her evocative use of wood. In postwar refugee camps she sought security in provisional wooden barracks rapidly assembled to provide rudimentary forms of shelter for displaced people. She pressed her body against the wooden walls feeling t protective textures while inhaling the smell of the wood. In conditions of extremity, the wood offered a vital, renewing animism to a bewildered and frightened young child. A descendant of Polish farmers, perhaps these experiences also summoned images of enormous wood piles, homes and tools made of wood that are an enduring source of ideas and inspiration for the artist.
In 1950, the artist’s family boarded a ship in Bremerhaven, Germany that sailed to the United States and they eventually settled in Plainville, Connecticut. Von Rydingsvard attended public school and assisted her parents with the work and maintenance of the family.
She recalls discovering art and imagined what it would be like to be an artist, yet never believed that this could be possible. In college in Florida she studied art education and taught in public schools for nine years in different locations. Ultimately she abandoned the securities of teaching and employment to move to New York with her three-year-old daughter. She founa small loft on Spring Street, which she purchased with her life savings from school teaching, raised her daughter, often subsisted on food stamps and odd jobs, and pursued a Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University. As a sculpture student she spent most of her time welding, but near the conclusion of her program she was introduced to milled cedar—four inch by four inch by eight feet lengths—whose responsive vascular structure has animated her artistic practice for forty years.
It is not surprising that early life encounters of displacement and poverty have annealed a constitutive resourcefulness and her legendary work ethic. Although she often draws and makes small objects that present themselves equivocally yet stoically as eccentric, functionally ambivalent tools and artifacts, the epicenter of the work is large-scale cedar sculptures (which are often the original and first generation of monumental works of bronze, copper, and other materials) assembled and stacked into thick forms that are cut, ed, and agitated with circular saws operated by studio assistants known as 'cutters.' Like the laboratory of a scientist engaged in collaborative research and experiments, von Rydingsvard’s studio has a small, loyal family of assistants who work with her to navigate technical and conceptual questions and enter the unknowns and uncertainties presented by each new work. With the artist, they are a dedicated community who help to advance often challenging aesthetic experiments. Yet there is genuine conviviality in the demanding work; no matter how pressing the deadline or daunting the task, each day they all break for a shared lunch at the rough wooden table in the studio’s small kitchen, often including guests who may be visiting.
Von Rydingsvard’s work for the McGovern Institute is a striking and compelling embodiment of the intricacy of aesthetic form as metaphor or surrogate for the cellular and visceral, electrical and chemical infrastructure of the human brain. Functioning like the cranial caprotects the brain, von Rydingsvard frequently utilizes and continues to push to its limits ypology, forms, technology, and meaning in the inner spaces of enormous vessels or bowls that contain, protect, and mysteriously withhold. The genesis of Scientia is a narrow base and foundation constructed of cedar elements that have been assembled, cut, and incised to create a gradually and gracefully opening and unfolding vessel that leads to a dramatic summit—a magnificent, lace-like bronze crown. The expansive work is 25 feet tall (and the artist’s largest work to date.) First a full-scale cedar sculpture, once completed in the artist’s Brooklyn studio, it was shipped to Polich Tallix Foundry in Rock Tavern, New York to be cast in bronze. Yet its ultimate embellishment of five feet of an open, lattice-like bronze crown was developed through drawings and refinements by the artist and her own work on wax molds for this fantastic cast element.
Art is a genuine and generous, if often challenging invitation tl with its forms and ideas through our own restive processes of conviction and doubt. The creations of von Rydingsvard are agents of inquiry that dynamically and dialectically present and withhold meaning. It is within the liminal spaces of mystery and possibility that we encounter the palpable bonds of different forms of knowledge - and a deep desire of discovery - as indicative features of the human experience.
www.wikipedia.org:
Ursula von Rydingsvard (born 26 July 1942) is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.
Von Rydingsvard was born in Deensen, Germany in 1942 to a Polish mother and Ukrainian father. As a young child, the artist and her six siblings experienced the German occupation of Poland and the trauma of World War II, followed by five years in eight different German refugee camps for displaced Poles. In 1959, through the U.S. Marshall Plan and with the assistance of Catholic agencies, her family of peasant farmers boarded a ship to the United States where they eventually settled in Plainville, Connecticut. She received a BA and MA from University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida in 1965 and an MFA from Columbia University in New York City in 1975. In the late 1970s, she was part of NYC's Cultural Council Foundation Artists' Project, which was funded under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (Ceta).
Major permanent commissions of her work are on view at the Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA; Storm King Art Center, New York; the Bloomberg Building, New York; the Queens Family Courthouse, New York; the Nelson-Atkins, Kansas City, and the Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York. Mad. Sq. Art: Ursula von Rydingsvard was the outdoor solo exhibition presented at Madison Square Park in 2006.
In 2008, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters along with being featured in Art:21 Art in the Twenty-First Century on PBS. A monograph on her work titled The Sculpture of Ursula von Rydingsvard was published by Hudson Hills Press in 1996 and in 2011 Prestel published Ursula von Rydingsvard: Working. In 2014-2015 Ursula von Rydingsvard had her first British show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (West Yorkshire, UK), her most extensive exhibition to date. The exhibition was accompanied by the Ursula von Rydingsvard 2014 Catalogue, a major publication featuring text by Molly Donovan, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington."