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.”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/gkEazBW
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