www.nmwa.org:
On Princeton’s campus, outside the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, von Rydingsvard installed Uroda. Its surface is made of more than 3,000 pieces of copper, hammered by hand to conform to the curves of her textural cedar model. While it may seem familiar to fans of her work—the towering funnel shape marks it as one of von Rydingsvard’s 'bowl' sculptures—its creation broke new ground as the artist’s first large-scale piece made primarily of copper.
www.nmwa.org:
Ursula von Rydingsvard presents the artist’s monumental cedar wood sculptures. The poetic and expressive works, which also use leather, linen, and other organic materials, reveal the process by which von Rydingsvard gives outward visual form to her innermost ideas and emotions.
Princeton University Art Museum:
This fourteen minute documentary follows the remarkable and labor-intensive creation of Ursula "Uroda", a site specific sculpture commissioned to highlight the entrance to the new Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University.
The nineteen-foot-tall work is von Rydingsvard’s first sculpture made primarily of copper. Her full-sized maquette, created using stacked, texturized cedar beams shaped with a circular saw, took six months to build. The finished piece—made of more than 3,000 hand-pounded copper pieces—was fabricated by the metal artist Richard Webber and a team of skilled craftspeople. Princeton University is home to one of the most significant public art collections in the United States.
This most recent addition to Princeton’s outdoor sculpture collection was installed in Fall 2015 and dedicated in spring 2016 with the new building, designed by architects Tod Williams, Princeton class of 1965, and Billie Tsien.
Princeton University Art Museum:
Ursula von Rydingsvard’s nineteen-foot-tall sculpture Uroda, commissioned for the Andlinger Center for the Environment, is the artist’s first sculpture made primarily of copper. Her full-sized maquette, created using stacked, texturized cedar beams shaped with a circular saw, took six months to build.
www.craftengin.com:
Scientia is a bronze sculpture by the artist Ursula von Rydingsvard installed at the entry to the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Craft utilized Finite Element Analysis to understand and verify the behavior of the sculpture and its mounting assembly subject to wind and seismic loading.
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 exd surfaces are scored and lacerated in a cacophony of the screeching blades of circular saws. Each new work builds on its 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 artistexfic and adaptive public work has been sited, either permanently or temporarily, in sculpture parks, urban plazas, and other 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 assembledo provide rudimentary forms of shelter for displaced people. She pressed her body against the wooden walls feeling the 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 e abandoned the securities of teaching and employment to move to New York with her three-year-old daughter. She found a 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 genera of monumental works of bronze, copper, and other materials) assembled and stacked into thick forms that are cut, sliced, 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 forlar and visceral, electrical and chemical infrastructure of the human brain. Functioning like the cranial cavity that protects 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 w wax molds for this fantastic cast element.
Art is a genuine and generous, if often challenging invitation to dwell 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.
On Princeton’s campus, outside the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, von Rydingsvard installed Uroda. Its surface is made of more than 3,000 pieces of copper, hammered by hand to conform to the curves of her textural cedar model. While it may seem familiar to fans of her work—the towering funnel shape marks it as one of von Rydingsvard’s 'bowl' sculptures—its creation broke new ground as the artist’s first large-scale piece made primarily of copper.
www.nmwa.org:
Ursula von Rydingsvard presents the artist’s monumental cedar wood sculptures. The poetic and expressive works, which also use leather, linen, and other organic materials, reveal the process by which von Rydingsvard gives outward visual form to her innermost ideas and emotions.
Princeton University Art Museum:
This fourteen minute documentary follows the remarkable and labor-intensive creation of Ursula "Uroda", a site specific sculpture commissioned to highlight the entrance to the new Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University.
The nineteen-foot-tall work is von Rydingsvard’s first sculpture made primarily of copper. Her full-sized maquette, created using stacked, texturized cedar beams shaped with a circular saw, took six months to build. The finished piece—made of more than 3,000 hand-pounded copper pieces—was fabricated by the metal artist Richard Webber and a team of skilled craftspeople. Princeton University is home to one of the most significant public art collections in the United States.
This most recent addition to Princeton’s outdoor sculpture collection was installed in Fall 2015 and dedicated in spring 2016 with the new building, designed by architects Tod Williams, Princeton class of 1965, and Billie Tsien.
Princeton University Art Museum:
Ursula von Rydingsvard’s nineteen-foot-tall sculpture Uroda, commissioned for the Andlinger Center for the Environment, is the artist’s first sculpture made primarily of copper. Her full-sized maquette, created using stacked, texturized cedar beams shaped with a circular saw, took six months to build.
www.craftengin.com:
Scientia is a bronze sculpture by the artist Ursula von Rydingsvard installed at the entry to the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Craft utilized Finite Element Analysis to understand and verify the behavior of the sculpture and its mounting assembly subject to wind and seismic loading.
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 exd surfaces are scored and lacerated in a cacophony of the screeching blades of circular saws. Each new work builds on its 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 artistexfic and adaptive public work has been sited, either permanently or temporarily, in sculpture parks, urban plazas, and other 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 assembledo provide rudimentary forms of shelter for displaced people. She pressed her body against the wooden walls feeling the 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 e abandoned the securities of teaching and employment to move to New York with her three-year-old daughter. She found a 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 genera of monumental works of bronze, copper, and other materials) assembled and stacked into thick forms that are cut, sliced, 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 forlar and visceral, electrical and chemical infrastructure of the human brain. Functioning like the cranial cavity that protects 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 w wax molds for this fantastic cast element.
Art is a genuine and generous, if often challenging invitation to dwell 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.