The Brooklyn Rail

A poignant list of responses to the question, “Why Do I Make Art” published in a 2018 exhibition catalogue exposes the urgency driving Ursula von Rydingsvard’s lifelong fever for artmaking. Ranging from survival and staying awake and alive, to hope of healing and finding a place to put immeasurable family pain and sadness, and to self-discovery and pleasure, the artist’s revelations illuminate the source and the physical manifestations of her creative power for more than four decades.

Ursula von Rydingsvard’s current exhibition presents an array of sculptural and graphic gestures that demonstrate an unceasing fluidity and openness. New forms, allusions, strategies, and inventive surface articulations expand upon the artist’s already rich sculptural vocabulary and distinctively intuitive approach to process and materials. Walking into the gallery, the visitor’s gaze is drawn toward a tall cedar sculpture comprised of two slanting organic masses that touch at their apex to form an opening in the center. Upward reaching finger-like protrusions activate the surfaces in buoyant, decorative patterns that complement the mystical stillness of the interior chamber. Nearby is Untitled (2024), a hanging wall sculpture seemingly on the verge of taking flight, whose upper portion evokes angel wings on which the artist’s hands have been repeatedly traced in graphite. Bringing specific awareness to von Rydingsvard’s hands and fingers reinforces the omnipresence of the her sense of touch at every step of the creative process.

Von Rydingsvard has long been recognized for monumentally scaled, cedar sculptures emerging out of the assembly of 4 x 4 beams that have been incised, cut, chipped and feathered in an all over surface faceting that is enhanced by the expressive application of powdered graphite. Abstract and physically imposing presences that hold and express the joy and pain of the human condition, von Rydingsvard’s art personifies the dignity and honesty of hand-labor suffused with emotional intensity and spirituality. At Galerie Lelong, the formal and psychological effects in the intricacies and nuances of her sculptural gesturing are on full display. This can be felt in the three contiguous and converging vessel-like forms comprising All the Children I Never Had (2018–24), as well as in the upright, twisting, totemic personage, Untitled (2022)—whose tactile surfaces shift and vibrate even as their overall volumes remain fixed and static. On the wall to the right of the gallery entrance, Miracle (2024) is realized through a dramatic range of incisions that are alternately jagged, smooth, sharp, and precise. It hangs and projects off the wall like a suspended arch. Untitled (1995–2025), begun in 1995 and finished last year is a large, irregularly gridded wall work contained within a rectangular frame and placed flat against the wall. It offers a clear reference to von Rydingsvard’s minimalist roots which reverberate in the repetitive elements, grids, and lines throughout her work.

The side gallery is installed with two sculptures and five drawings. Drawing has been a constant in von Rydingsvard’s practice as a private, uninhibited, and spontaneous place for exploring ideas, imagery and psychological states, though she never makes preparatory sketches for sculptures and has rarely exhibited them. It is worth noting that as part of a twenty-year survey of von Rydingsvard’s work that is currently on view at the Bruce Museum, one can look at her ten-year investigation into the physicality of handmade paper with thread, pigment, personal items, lace, and textiles that began with a 2009 Dieu Donne residency. At Lelong, in drawings against white grounds of modestly sized paper, Von Rydingsvard has set horizontal rectangles divided into gridded sections and filled them with personal and idiosyncratic graphic incidents. They are whimsical, cryptic, and densely filled with all manner of lines, doodles, and abstract images rendered with a delicate touch. Though unrelated to the two sculptures with which they share the gallery, a lovely non sequitur dialogue arises between the intimate marks in the drawings and their corollaries in the sculptures’ three-dimensional, chiseled faceting. Drawing, after all, has always been a part of von Rydingsvard’s sculptural process, as graphite lines that the artist first draws on the floor to position and initiate their formation and then, as lines on the cedar planks themselves to direct the location of cuts which remain visible on the final sculpture. Additionally, drawing occurs in the application of powdered graphite to the red wood surfaces for a greyish-black patina that yields evocative variations of shadow and light.

Ursula von Rydingsvard’s drawings and sculptures are receptacles of a lifetime’s worth of angst, love, and passion. The outcome of her determination to prevail against any and all odds, von Rydingsvard’s works pulse with the vulnerability, optimism, and hope that are transmuted through the artist’s unique mind-hand connection and imprinted in their making.