5 Artists on our Radar in October 2026 https://ift.tt/gZt6Ob1

Inflorescência, 2026
Thalita Hamaoui
Simões de Assis

“Artists on Our Radar” is a monthly series focused on five artists who have our attention. Utilizing our art expertise and Artsy data, we’ve determined which artists made an impact this past month through new gallery representation, exhibitions, auctions, art fairs, or fresh works on Artsy.

James Owens

B. 1995, Middlesbrough, U.K. Lives and works in London.

Night in the Woods, 2020
James Owens
PM/AM

I Don’t Like a Bank That Hides Its Skeletons, 2026
James Owens
Public Gallery

British painter James Owens conjures imagined scenes that are shaped by his childhood spent between the countryside and a Yorkshire fishing village. In Owens’s Symbolist-like paintings, sunflowers sway ominously and grass blades droop under beads of water. His figures are often overlaid with patterns and abstractions, so that they seem to recede into their surroundings in a kind of camouflage.

Owens was part of Artsy’s emerging art fair Foundations in 2024 and exhibited works at Kiaf SEOUL 2024. Earlier this month, Newchild Gallery announced his representation, and this November, Owens will be featured at the gallery in an upcoming duo exhibition with Yoo Geun-Taek.

Thalita Hamaoui

B. 1981, São Paulo. Lives and works in São Paulo.

Fim do horizonte, 2026
Thalita Hamaoui
Simões de Assis

Ritmo da terra, 2026
Thalita Hamaoui
Simões de Assis

Brazilian artist Thalita Hamaoui paints large, colorful landscapes built from memory and family storytelling. In a recent series, she painted scenery drawn from stories her grandmother told about her native Romania—a country Hamaoui has never visited. Filtered through the tropical environment she knows, the hills, seas, and flowering plants take on a lush look. Folklore, fantasy, and grief over her grandmother’s death run through the work, and the ground often seems to give way even as the terrain becomes a refuge, a place of possibility.

Hamaoui cites Brazilian Tropicália, a counterculture movement of the 1960s, along with Impressionists such as Pierre Bonnard as her influences. She studied fine art at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado and spent years working in textile printing, an experience that continues to influence her understanding of form and color.

Hamaoui’s works were recently presented alongside historic works by Brazilian modern artist Miguel Bakun at a duo booth with Simões de Assis at Frieze London. Her New York solo debut, “Nascer da Terra,” was at Marianne Boesky. Earlier this spring she opened “Corpo de Vento” at Simões de Assis.

Qian Zhong

B. 1995, Sichuan, China. Lives and works in London.

Afterimage, 2026
Qian Zhong
Soho Revue

Artist Qian Zhong paints surreal, fragmented figures that explore women’s identity and desire. In her current solo show “Almost Body” on view at Soho Revue in London through October 31st, cropped-in snapshots of feminine bodies—an abdomen, a lower back, a crotch—are shown tightly clad in shiny lamé and sequined dresses. These spectacle-like ensembles offer a juxtaposition to the introspective, even lonely quality of the works, like coming home after a long night or standing alone on a crowded dance floor.

Zhong, who was born in Sichuan, earned her MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in London in 2025. Before that, she founded a studio in Chengdu, China, focused on public and community-based art, and her experience with large-scale murals informs how she handles space and visual impact on canvas.

Alejandro Javaloyas

B. 1987, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Lives and works in Toulouse, France.

Is there a murder in your film?, 2025
Alejandro Javaloyas
Galeria Reus

Neither shall ye profane my holy name (Leviticus 22:32), 2026
Alejandro Javaloyas
Galeria Reus

Toulouse-based artist Alejandro Javaloyas creates intimately scaled, hazy, atmospheric images that balance a delicacy of form and color with a foreboding sense of unease.

This summer, Javaloyas’s solo exhibition “Un cuchillo que no corta” at Galeria Reus in Palma, Spain, delved deep into this tension. The book-size paintings were inspired by recurring nightmares the artist has, which he logs in a dream journal he has kept for years. Javaloyas then uses AI models to visualize his notes, selects a few images from many variations, and reworks them digitally into prints. The prints, made on cotton paper and layered with wax-based colored pencil, show burning houses, crashed cars, and baby teeth with the blur of a dream.

Javaloyas holds a master’s degree in film from ESCAC Barcelona Film School at the University of Barcelona, and many of his influences are cinematic, including directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Chris Marker, and David Lynch. This year, he won the 20th edition of the Prisma Art Prize with his colored pencil diptych titled Incredulità di San Tommaso (2026).

Austin Hayman

B. 1989, Santa Monica, California. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Looking for a Friend, 2026
Austin Hayman
Make Room

Los Angeles painter Austin Hayman makes figurative oil paintings that teeter on the edge of Surrealism. Simple domestic scenes—girls braiding each other’s hair, for instance—are made unfamiliar by the introduction of out-of-place elements like a single green apple or a glowing candle that create a Magritte-like effect. These figures are usually people Hayman knows in spaces they inhabit.

A self-taught painter, Hayman has recently been on the rise. This summer, he had a solo show, “Looking for a Friend,” at Make Room in Los Angeles. Other recent exhibitions include the solo show “Won’t Say Anything at All” at Allgorithm Gallery in Los Angeles and the group exhibition “Inherent Manifest” at Gambit Gallery in New York.

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Centre Pompidou, MoMA, and M+ form new cultural alliance. https://ift.tt/Lwpl61x

Centre Pompidou, MoMA, and M+ have formed a new cultural alliance, the three institutions announced Friday. The museums have agreed to share their collections with one another's audiences, co-organize exhibitions and programs, and deepen their joint curatorial research and conservation work.

The museum directors—Christophe Cherix of MoMA, Laurent Le Bon of Centre Pompidou, and Suhanya Raffel of M+—signed a framework agreement at an event at M+ in Hong Kong. Each museum will retain its independence and identity, but the alliance is intended to give their combined 10 million annual in-person visitors and 125 million online visitors expanded access .

Founded in 1929, 1977, and 2021 respectively, MoMA, Centre Pompidou, and M+ each represented a new model for collecting institutions focused on the art of their time. Together the museums hold a broad, multidisciplinary record of 20th- and 21st-century creativity across three continents. “This cultural alliance makes our museums embassies for each other, in effect creating an extraordinary gateway that opens onto three continents,” MoMA’s Cherix said. “Beyond expanding our reach to an unprecedented level, the cultural alliance also deepens intellectual exchange, as we align our programming, organize joint exhibitions, preserve art, and unite audiences worldwide, allowing us to function as more than the sum of our parts.”

“No single institution can encompass the entire scope of global creativity. We aim to work on a broader and deeper level,” said Pompidou’s Le Bon, adding that the alliance would “enable long-term loans, deepening the presentation of key artists and movements.” The alliance arrives as Centre Pompidou marks its 50th anniversary with “Constellation,” a year of exhibitions and programs in Paris and internationally, while its landmark Beaubourg building undergoes an extensive renovation.

M+’s Raffel, meanwhile, framed the partnership as a chance to widen whose perspectives shape the story of modern and contemporary art. “As Asia's global museum of contemporary visual culture, M+ brings perspectives from Hong Kong and our region to this dialogue,” Raffel said “We hope to create new opportunities for artists and audiences, shape a more cooperative and sustainable future for museums, and reimagine how cultural narratives resonate around the world.”

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How This Painting of Witches Became a Metaphor for Female Political Power https://ift.tt/0YWMhDy

Clouds whirl across the night sky, only a sliver of moon visible. In these woods, three witches are gathered around a cauldron. An orange cat and a ram cavort beside them, and a ghoulish face emerges from the darkness. But the witches themselves are anything but frightening. No crones with warts and knobby fingers, these ladies are the epitome of elegance, wearing diaphanous gowns and stupendous hats that cascade with long veils. Youthful, with porcelain skin and rosy cheeks, they strike refined poses. One witch on the right, wearing a pointy black hat, looks out from the artwork toward the viewer, aware she is being watched.

The Three Witches from Macbeth (1775), by the British portraitist Daniel Gardner, is now in the collection of London’s National Portrait Gallery. Every year, as Halloween approaches, the museum tends to highlight the spooky but spectacular gouache-and-chalk painting.

Gardner was a well-known society portraitist and a student of the fashionable painter George Romney, from whom, he famously claimed, he learned little. His witches aren’t fantastical: His models were three of the most influential women in Georgian England. This triple portrait captures Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne (left); Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (center); and the sculptor Anne Seymour Damer (right) decked out as the three witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In the play, the trio prophesy Macbeth’s rise to the kingship and ultimately lead him to his demise. Society women were sometimes portrayed as classical or pastoral figures, but depicting three of them as characters in a theatrical scene was unusual. The painting is a quizzical outlier in Gardner’s oeuvre—the only time he depicted his sitters in costume—yet it reflects a larger fascination with gothic and supernatural themes that took place in Georgian England.

The late 1700s saw a widespread fascination with Macbeth

In the mid-to-late 1700s, a Macbeth mania swept through English public culture. For well over a century, the play had been out of style. English theaters had been shuttered from 1642 to 1660 by order of the Puritan government. For close to 100 years after they reopened, Macbeth was performed only rarely. That changed in 1744, when the actor and writer David Garrick debuted a new production of Macbeth that returned more faithfully to Shakespeare’s text, bringing the play back into the limelight. The three witches became a popular motif in art and poetry, with artists including Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and Romney all painting or drawing their own versions of Macbeth’s three witches.

The public fascination with Macbeth and its famous king-killing may have been stirred, in part, by the discord in nearby France, which crescendoed from the protests and riots of the 1760s and ’70s to the bloody tumult of the revolution itself in the final years of the decade. At the same time England was under the rule of King George III, the so-called “mad king,” who was known for mental health episodes that might have seemed not dissimilar to Macbeth’s outbursts. Amid heavy censorship of the era, Shakespeare’s play offered an outlet for contemporary anxieties.

The portrait celebrates three patrons of the arts

Lady Melbourne, the Duchess of Devonshire, and Anne Seymour Damer were high-powered friends and well-known supporters of the theater. All three women took part in amateur productions at the private theater at Althorp, the Duchess of Devonshire’s family estate. Lady Melbourne is thought to have commissioned the portrait from Gardner, and it descended through her family. Scholars believe either she or Damer may have suggested the composition.

A plaster portrait bust of Lord Nelson after Anne Seymour Damer, ca. 1802
A plaster portrait bust of Lord Nelson after Anne Seymour Damer
Wick Antiques Ltd

Damer was also a well-known sculptor of the era. Encouraged by her guardian Horace Walpole, she studied different types of art with a number of prominent teachers of the era, including modeling with Giuseppe Ceracchi, marble carving with John Bacon, and anatomy with William Cumberland Cruikshank. She worked chiefly in the Neoclassical style, making busts that moved from early wax pieces to technically complex work in terra-cotta, bronze, and marble. Her subjects were largely her society friends, like politician Charles James Fox and, later, British naval admiral Horatio Nelson. She also portrayed the actresses Sarah Siddons (who earned fame for her turn as Lady Macbeth in the 1780s) and Elizabeth Farren (a popular comic performer) as Muses. Her art often referenced the world of theater. For instance, she made a statue of Apollo for the façade of Drury Lane Theatre and a bas-relief for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery.

Gardner’s portrait was also one of political power

By the time of this portrait, all three women held prominent positions in British society and shared a passion for Whig politics. Lady Melbourne had been friends with Damer since the early 1770s, while her friendship with the Duchess of Devonshire was newer. The portrait may in part reflect Lady Melbourne’s wish to publicize that new intimacy with the Duchess, who would go on to host England’s most influential political salon from 1776. The National Portrait Gallery describes Gardner’s choice of the cauldron scene to represent their “shadowy political machinations” as leading members of the Devonshire House circle. The witches in the play, after all, famously urge Macbeth toward power.

The painting is not known to have been exhibited in its time, but contemporaries clearly knew of it. Lady Mary Coke wrote in her 1775 journal of “the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Melburn, and Mrs Damer all being drawn in one picture in the Characters of the three Witches in Macbeth…They have chosen that Scene where they compose their Cauldron, but instead of ‘finger of Birth-strangled babe, etc’ their Cauldron is composed of roses and carnations and I daresay they think their charmes more irresistible than all the magick of the Witches.”

The label of “witch” has historically been used to discredit women whose power made others uneasy. By casting themselves in the role, with roses in place of grisly ingredients, these three society women seem to claim power for themselves, treating the idea of dangerous female influence as a compliment rather than an insult.

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Artist Prince Gyasi and singer Davido collaborate on limited-edition Martell cognac bottle. https://ift.tt/U9nF5Ew

Artist Prince Gyasi and singer Davido have collaborated on a limited-edition Martell cognac bottle. Maison Martell unveiled its Martell Afrobeats collection this week in New York, marking the global launch of the new Martell VS and XO limited-edition bottle designs. The release builds on Martell’s five-year relationship with Davido and introduces Gyasi’s new role as the Maison's creative partner.

For the Martell VS label, Gyasi reworked Davido’s portrait in his signature saturated, block-color style, surrounding it with soundwaves meant to evoke the singer's global reach, while incorporating Martell’s house blue branding alongside gold and wave-like forms inspired by the landscapes of West Africa. An XO expression, designed separately, will launch exclusively in Africa.

“When I hear music, I experience it visually,” Gyasi said in a statement. “With these designs, I wanted to capture the feeling of Afrobeats—the movement, the joy, the confidence, and the way it connects people across the world. Davido brings that energy through music, and I wanted to translate it through color, movement, and emotion.” Davido, for his part, framed the bottle as a natural extension of his partnership with the brand: “Five years with Martell, and we’ve built something really special for this launch. Bringing Prince into the mix to connect the music with his creative vision took it to a new level.”

Gyasi, who is self-taught and took up photography as a teenager in Accra using an iPhone, is known for surreal compositions informed by his synesthesia, which links colors to words and emotions. He became the first African artist to shoot the Pirelli Calendar, creative-directing its 50th-anniversary 2024 edition. He was also named one of Time’s Next Generation Leaders in 2023, and has collaborated with Apple, Off-White, and Balmain. His work is held in the Pinault Collection, the Jean Pigozzi Collection, and the Museu de Arte do Rio.

Davido, the most-followed Afrobeats artist on social media, released his sixth studio album, ORIADÉ, this summer.

The New York launch, hosted by Martell culture ambassador Adesope “Shopsydoo” Olajide, included a fireside conversation between Davido and Gyasi and closed with a live Davido performance. The announcement coincides with the release of Davido's new music video for “Already Falling,” filmed at Martell’s historic Château de Chanteloup estate in Cognac, France, and featuring the new bottle designs. “Martell’s heritage is rooted in craftsmanship and an optimistic spirit, with an openness to the cultural forces shaping our world,” said Sébastien Borda, Pernod Ricard’s vice president of marketing for prestige brands. “Through this limited edition, Davido and Prince Gyasi bring music, art, and design together in a way that feels distinctive, joyful, and contemporary.”

The Martell VS Afrobeats bottle is available now at retailers across the U.S. and on Martell.com for $35, while supplies last. The XO limited-edition bottle will roll out separately in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya.

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Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2027 announces nominees. https://ift.tt/Euve70I

The Photographers’ Gallery in London and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation have named four artists shortlisted for the 2027 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize: Hoda Afshar, Lotus L. Kang, Sasha Kurmaz, and Salvatore Vitale.

Now marking its 30th anniversary, the prize recognizes an exhibition or book that has made a significant contribution to photography in Europe over the past year. It is widely considered one of the most important international awards for contemporary photography.

The winner will receive £30,000 ($40,000) when announced in April 2027, with each of the other shortlisted artists receiving £5,000 ($6,600.00). Selected work from all four will go on view at the Photographers’ Gallery in London from March 10th to June 6th, before traveling to the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation in Eschborn, near Frankfurt, from June 19th to September 26th.

Afshar, an Iranian-born artist, is nominated for “Performing the Invisible” at the Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac in Paris. The exhibition, which ran from December 2025 to January 2026, centered on The Fold, a project drawing on the archive of French psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault to examine colonial photography’s lasting hold on how veiled bodies are seen. Kang, a Toronto-born artist, is shortlisted for “The face of desire is loss.” The installation of suspended, light- and humidity-reactive film “skins” alongside sculptural objects is currently on view at the Bulgari Pavilion as part of the 61st Venice Biennale. Kurmaz, a Ukrainian artist, is nominated for Red Horse, an 800-page visual diary of handmade collage, photographs, and ephemera chronicling life in Ukraine since Russia's 2022 invasion, published by Éditions Images Vevey. Vitale, an Italian artist, is shortlisted for “SABOTAGE” at Photo Elysée in Lausanne, France. The exhibition, which ran from March to May, examines the hidden labor—developed through collaborations with South African freelancers—underpinning automation and the digital economy.

“As we reach the 30th anniversary of the prize giving, the 2027 shortlist represents the expansiveness of photography and how it's used to explore ideas of resistance, conflict, memory and identity in our contemporary age,” said Shoair Mavlian, director of the Photographers' Gallery, who chairs the jury. “From century-old photographic archives to radical contemporary experiments, the 2027 shortlist proves how urgently photography speaks to our times,” added Anne-Marie Beckmann, director of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation.

The 2026 prize went to Rene Matić for the exhibition “AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH” at CCA Berlin. Past winners include Lindokuhle Sobekwa, Lebohang Kganye, Samuel Fosso, Deana Lawson, Cao Fei, Susan Meiselas, and Rineke Dijkstra.

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How Brâncuși’s “Bird in Space” Redefined Sculpture https://ift.tt/4Vpg7F0

“Simplicity is complexity resolved,” Romanian artist Constantin Brâncuși once remarked. The sculptor, painter, and photographer brought that ethos of refinement to his art. He is regarded as one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century and a pioneer of modernism, known for sleek works in plaster, limestone, marble, polished bronze, and carved wood that emphasized elegant purity of form over detail.

His Paris studio was on the famed Impasse Ronsin, a dead-end street home to a buzzing artists’ colony. The studio was the center of his creative universe: where he worked, entertained friends and clients, and displayed his groundbreaking works, whose forms challenged conventional artistic boundaries. A new exhibition, “Brâncuși: The Artist and His Studio,” at the Museum of Modern Art, traces the provocative artist’s creative life through dozens of artworks and objects from his studio.

Among the most famous of these works were “Bird in Space” (L’Oiseau dans l’espace), a series of at least 16 sculptures the artist made between 1923 and 1940. Created in bronze and marble, each Bird in Space depicts a streamlined, vertical form that suggests flight rather than a bird itself.

Three bronze versions of Brâncuși’s iconic work are included in the exhibition. In the work, Brâncuși eliminated the bird’s wings and feathers, instead elongating the swell of the body. The bird’s head and beak are reduced to a small oval plane. A radical departure from sculptural precedents that emphasized the artist’s hand and detail, the deceptively simple Bird in Space courted controversy and misunderstanding. Here’s a closer look at three surprising aspects of the work and its history.

In a pivotal court case, it redefined sculpture.

The Kiss, 1916
Constantin Brâncuși
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Brummer Gallery Exhibition Catalog, 1926
Constantin Brâncuși
Grob Gallery

In legal terms, “Bird in Space” rewrote the definition of sculpture. In 1926, Brâncuși shipped a version of the work from Paris to New York City for an exhibition at the Brummer Gallery, organized by Marcel Duchamp, his close friend and advocate. U.S. law allowed artworks, including sculpture, to enter the country free of import taxes. But when Bird in Space arrived, officials refused to admit it as art. At the time, sculptures were defined as reproductions, in carving or casting, of natural objects such as the human form. Finding no such recognizable form, officials classified the work as a utilitarian object, “Kitchen Utensils and Hospital Supplies” to be specific, and imposed a duty of 40 percent of its value.

The sculpture, today in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum, ended up at the center of a landmark 1928 court case, Constantin Brâncuși v. United States, in which Brâncuși defended his work as art. The case began as a question of how closely the work imitated a bird, which would clear it of the import tax, but evolved into a debate over who decides what counts as sculpture, and why. A number of art world heavyweights testified, including photographer Edward Steichen, British sculptor Jacob Epstein, and William Henry Fox, director of the Brooklyn Museum. Art critic Frank Crowninshield testified that the work did suggest a bird: “It has the suggestion of flight, it suggests grace, aspiration, vigor, coupled with speed in the spirit of strength, potency, beauty, just as a bird does. But just the name, the title, of this work, why, really, it does not mean much.” Ultimately, the court ruled in Brâncuși’s favor.

The judge’s opinion in the case referenced the rise of abstraction: “a so-called new school of art, whose exponents attempt to portray abstract ideas rather than imitate natural objects.” He added, “While some difficulty might be encountered in associating it with a bird, it is nevertheless pleasing to look at and highly ornamental.” Ultimately, he decided the sculpture is a work of art, allowing it tax-free entry to the U.S.

Critics see “Bird in Space” as a representation of the artist himself

Self-Portrait, 1935
Constantin Brâncuși
Osborne Samuel

Bird in Space (white marble), 1925
Constantin Brâncuși
Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Brâncuși did not indulge in deep readings of his sculptures, preferring their often gleaming, highly polished surfaces to speak for themselves. “Don’t look for obscure formulas or mystery in my work. It is pure joy that I offer you,” he once proclaimed. That gave critics a tricky task when it came to interpreting Brâncuși’s work, as noted by American artist Sidney Geist in his 1984 essay “Brâncuși’s ‘Bird in Space’: A Psychological Reading.”

“We see a finished, perfect product; we are in the presence of exquisite drawing and an exquisite sensibility,” Geist wrote. “Brâncuși doesn’t show his hand. He carefully gives his work titles, which seem to conceal rather more than they reveal.”

In the essay, Geist avoids purely formalist interpretations of Brâncuși's work, looking instead to repeated themes and motifs as evidence of their significance. “Bird in Space,” he argues offers an oblique portrait of the artist himself, who was born in Romania but fled a difficult childhood home and traveled extensively throughout his life.

“Brâncuși’s elusiveness is linked, then, to traveling, to escape, to going beyond. Bird in Space will be symbolic of his craving for, and of his flight to, the absolute.” Geist argues that the work may show no bird at all, but can instead be seen as the upright form of a man with a swelling chest, or as a phallic symbol, or even a flame.

“It is symbolic of the urge for transcendence, for escape from the earthly and the contingent,” he continues. As the artist himself once declared, “All my life I have sought the essence of flight. Flight—what bliss!”

Several “Bird in Space” sculptures were intended for a never-completed temple of love.

Not every “Bird in Space” was meant for a gallery. After meeting Brâncuși in Paris in 1933, Yeshwant Rao Holkar, the maharaja of Indore, India, ordered three: one in bronze, one in black marble, and one in white. When his young wife died in 1937, he invited the sculptor to India to design a temple of love and peace to hold her ashes.

Brâncuși’s plan was uncompromising. The structure would have no doors or windows and would be entered through an underground passage. Inside an apple-shaped chamber, a small square pool would be flanked by the three birds, at the pool’s sides. The bronze would be placed so that the midday sun lit it just once a year. Henri-Pierre Roché, the dealer who introduced the maharaja to Brâncuși, described the bronze as “struck full by the midday sun, through the circular hole in the ceiling on a particular holy day of the year.”

When Brâncuși reached Indore at the end of 1937, his patron was away on a tiger hunt and beginning a new romance. After a frustrating month, Brâncuși went home. The temple was never built.

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Sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard dies at 84. https://ift.tt/kcyouR2

Ursula von Rydingsvard, the artist known for her towering sculptures built from hundreds of hand-distressed cedar beams, died Tuesday, October 27th, at her home in Manhattan. She was 84. Courtney Childress, her studio manager, confirmed the death and said the cause was Alzheimer's disease.

Working chiefly with standard four-by-four cedar beams, von Rydingsvard and a team of assistants marked, cut, and distressed the wood with circular saws before stacking it like bricks into enormous structures that often widened as they rose, their surfaces sometimes stained with powdered graphite. The resulting forms seemed to undulate and shift, evoking cave walls, frozen waves, and fossils. She later expanded her materials to include resin, bronze, silk, hair, and cow intestines, but the cedar works remained her signature medium.

Von Rydingsvard came of age as an artist when Minimalism dominated the New York scene. She found it lacking. “There was no sexiness, and there wasn't even any humanity,” she told the artist and curator Mark Rosenthal, who organized a 2018 survey of her work at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Her work had different aims. "Her sculptural process has a great deal to do with release," the critic Michael Brenson wrote in the New York Times in 1988. “Release is one of the effects she is after.”

The artist trained in welding at Columbia University, describing the process as "more frustrating than imaginable" in an interview with critic Jason Farago for Even magazine. Her classmate, the painter Michael Mulhern, introduced her to cedar, buying her a supply of four-by-four beams.

von Rydingsvard took the wood to a metalworking studio and began slicing through it, looking for "forms that felt like the earth, or felt fleshy." Critics read her repeated, modular components as being in conversation with Minimalism even as her carved, organic shapes pushed back against it, and her sculptures' folds and physicality drew comparisons to the biomorphic work of Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse.

She was born Urszula Karoliszyn in Deensen, Germany, on July 26, 1942, to Polish and Ukrainian farmers. Her father had been conscripted for labor by the Nazis, and after the war the family was held in a displaced-persons camp in Germany before emigrating to the United States in 1950 and settling in Plainville, Connecticut. There, her mother worked at a restaurant and her father worked a nearby farm and a factory job. It was, she later said, a place with “no such thing as an artist.” She helped raise her siblings and eventually worked at her mother's restaurant herself.

Von Rydingsvard studied at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Miami, Coral Gables, earning a bachelor's and master's degree. She then moved to Oakland, California, with her first husband, Milton von Rydingsvard, with whom she had a daughter, Ursula Anne. She divorced him in 1973 and moved with her daughter to New York, enrolling at Columbia University, where she studied with Max Kozloff, Meyer Schapiro, and George Sugarman, earning an MFA in 1975. She supported herself and her daughter on food stamps in a Harlem apartment.

Some critics saw autobiography in the work—Zakopane (1987), with its sacs of wood beneath spiky protrusions, takes its title from the Polish town where von Rydingsvard's mother was born—though she described the connection as only implicit. “I have this feeling that I have this strong link to a past that I never experienced, the peasant farmer past,” she told Farago. “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.”

After Columbia, she purchased a loft in SoHo, and in 1981 moved her studio to Brooklyn, where it remained for the rest of her career. She married the Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Paul Greengard in 1985. He died in 2019. In 2013, her 19-foot, 12,000-pound sculpture Ona—Polish for "she"—was installed beneath the oculus at Barclays Center, where it remains. “I would actually love people to touch it," she told the New York Times at its unveiling. “The acid from fingers polishes it, like the Buddhas getting their bellies rubbed.”

Her sculptures were shown widely, including at Storm King Art Center and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Storm King. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, had been an artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 1997 Joan Mitchell Award. She taught at Yale, the School of Visual Arts, Fordham University, and the Pratt Institute, and has been represented for decades by Galerie Lelong.

Earlier this year, the artist’s work was on view in "Ursula von Rydingsvard: States of Becoming," a 20-year retrospective at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, which ran through January 2026 and traced her evolving use of wood alongside a decade-long investigation into handmade paper that began with a 2009 Dieu Donné residency.

Her final gallery exhibition ran at Galerie Lelong in New York from February 19th through March 28th of this year. The exhibition included an arched, nearly 11-foot cedar sculpture introducing a new motif of upward-reaching, finger-like protrusions, first developed for a 2024 wall work on which she had traced the outline of her own hands.

Reviewing the show for the Brooklyn Rail, critic Susan Harris pointed to other recent works on view, including All the Children I Never Had (2018–24), Miracle (2024), and Untitled (1995–2025), a gridded wall piece begun three decades before its completion, calling the exhibition evidence of “an unceasing fluidity and openness” in the artist's late work.

Von Rydingsvard's daughter, Ursula Anne von Rydingsvard, died in 2022. She is survived by her siblings, Christine Brooks and Stash Karoliszyn, along with three grandchildren and three step-grandchildren. “They say when you get older, life gets easier,” she told Art21 in 2013. "…It does not. You know, my biggest hope is that I get more courage, I get more trust in myself, I get more faith, that I'm able to do things that I wasn't able to do before.”

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