URSULA von RYDINGSVARD
“I think I would have a very difficult time living without that great, great, great opportunity to put my thoughts and everything else into my work.”
Interview by Alexandra May, Detroit Contributor
Ursula von Rydingsvard is a sculptor who has been working in Brooklyn, New York, for over 30 years. Von Rydingsvard is best known for creating large-scale, often monumental sculpture from cedar beams, which she painstakingly cuts, assembles, laminates, and finally rubs down with powdered graphite into the work’s textured, faceted surfaces. Recently she has cast sculptures in bronze from full-scale cedar models. She deliberately uses cedar boards milled into 4" by 4" widths with varying lengths, which create a neutrality or "blank canvas" which enables her to dip into many different possibilities often within the arena of the psychological and emotional. As von Rydingsvard explains this approach: "If I were to say how it is that I break the convention of sculpture (and I'm not sure that's what I do or even if that's what I want to do), it would be by climbing into the work in a way that’s highly personal, that I can claim as being mine. The more mine it is, the more I’m able to break the convention."
Ursula von Rydingsvard’s work is represented in the permanent collections of over 30 museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Storm King Art Center, Detroit Institute of Arts, San Francisco MoMA, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. She has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, three awards from the American section of the International Association of Art Critics, the International Sculpture Center Lifetime Achievement Award, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Sculptures by von Rydingsvard are in the permanent collection and displayed at the Bloomberg Corporation, Barclays Center, Detroit Institute of Arts, Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the San Francisco MoMA, and The North Carolina Museum of Art, among many others. Major exhibitions include the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA (2018); the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA (2018); the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice (2015); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, UK (2014); Sculpture Center, Queens, New York (2011); Madison Square Park, New York (2006); and Storm King Art Center (1992).
Alexandra May: Hi, Ursula. How are you?
Ursula Von Rydingsvard: I know that you remember my reading the “Why I Make Art” when I spoke at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and you were so attentive. I was so appreciative. I saw you in the audience, and I felt good about that because you were sitting toward the front.
Alex: I was. Well, it was very interesting what you were reading, and your work is really beautiful. It speaks to me, so what can I say? I want to hold on to every word. I was online today just looking at different installations you've done, and I was thinking I need to go on a pilgrimage to different sites. You have all these great in-situ installations that are in so many different places that I haven't seen, so it would be nice to travel to them.
Ursula: Yeah. I do. I have two right now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I have one enormous piece that's outdoors, and I have a smaller one. The first one is made out of bronze, and she's beautiful. The other one is made out of resin, which is like a plastic. Resin is all about what you can do with light.
Elegantka II, ed3, 2018. © Ursula von Rydingsvard, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Photograph by Timothy Tiebout
Bronze Bowl With Lace, AP, 201, 2018. © Ursula von Rydingsvard, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Photograph by Timothy Tiebout
Alex: I remember from your talk in Detroit, you showed us some of your work in resin. It was so beautiful, and the light was shining through it as if it were an iceberg. All your pieces look like they're living organisms.
Ursula: Well, thank you so much. I learn a lot from nature.
Alex: Could you talk to me about your first memory of art making.
Ursula: I guess I can reach back to the times that I was in the camps. It never occurred to me that it was art making, or it never occurred to me that such a thing is art in itself. I mean, I think that the only painting that I ever saw was one of Jesus. We had a large barrack with a cross on top of it that became the church that we would go to. It was the only place in the camp that would have really clean, hand-made white doilies that they would put on the tabernacle. It was really decorated in a way that none of the barracks that we lived in were so it had its own distinction.
I remember being in another place that was just across the way, maybe about 70 feet or something like that, maybe not even that far. There were no roads in the multiple camps where we lived. Mainly, you had just paths that people happened to make. Some paths went to a place that had a water supply with an actual faucet. Nobody had any water inside their barracks, so they would make some functional paths.
But I went to a place that had a bomb, or more than one bomb, thrown on this brick building. I didn't even know what the brick building looked like, because there was just a lot of bricks. What I did is I took the bricks and started stacking them in various ways. The concept of art was never in my mind. What I was doing was playing, but there was a real rise that I got from it. It was almost sexual, but it's not as though I was walking around, hopping up and down from happiness. It wasn't like that. It not only interested me, but also I really liked stacking the bricks. Of course, most of the bricks were not whole. You had to kind of figure out how they could be put together into different ways.
I think that was probably my first art making, but I have another memory that reaches further back. When I was probably two, and this is in Germany, where my father was a forced laborer on a farm. I sat on the stairs. They might have just been stone. I was wearing a linen, but it wasn't a dress. It was something that I slept in, so it was very loose. It had long arms, and it went down to my ankles. The kind of linen that I wore, the kind of linen cloth that they used, was very raw, so it was very erect, and it was very scratchy. If you tried, you could even get some blood out of your arms if you rubbed them hard enough against this cloth.
I remember sitting on the stairs and having the sun shine on me. I looked at these folds, and I looked at the dark areas and the light areas, and was almost transfixed. I loved looking at it. It was such a pleasure for me to see what was going on with this “dress” that I slept in.
Alex: It’s amazing that you have that memory from so young. That's incredible. Do you think those early memories of placing the bricks is part of the reason why you chose to focus on sculpture as your medium?
Ursula: I don't think that such experiences guarantee becoming an artist but there was a will or a want already to live a life heavily oriented by visuals.
Alex: What do you think? Why is it that you're drawn to sculpture rather than painting, per se?
Ursula: That whole list that I read in “Why I Make Art” is so complex, and it doesn't even answer the question. I don't know how to answer the question of why I make it and why it is sculpture. When I was doing my paintings, after a good number of years, the paint started falling off the painting. I guess that gave me a hint that there was a yearning for something that's more three dimensional.
Alex: When you're making your sculpture and you're choosing your materials, they really do feel like living organisms. What is your thought process when you're creating an object? How do you choose the material?
Ursula: Well, I work mostly in cedar. For better or for worse, I keep wanting to get rid of it, to sort of say, "Okay. Enough," because I've been working with it for so long. It seems to be the material that does exactly what you just said, that it feels organic. It's very soft. It is easy to cut with many, many straight cuts, which is all you can do with a circular saw. If you make enough straight cuts, it makes a curve. So I was able to do that, and I have cut with a circular saw for about 40 years.
Now I have my cutters cut for me, but I make the mark on my four-by-four cedar board. It's not really a board, it's a four by four. They're still as organic, and I have fantastic, fantastic cutters, one who comes from Tucson, Arizona just to cut. He comes every other month.
© Ursula von Rydingsvard, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Photograph by David Allison, 2002
Alex: Can you talk a little bit about the texture on the surfaces of your sculptures, because they're so rich and detailed. You want to touch them, and they seem kind of mysterious. How do you determine your cuts? Is that something that you can plan in advance?
Ursula: It's impossible to plan in advance, but I do have to have some sort of an image of what I want. In my head I never do a drawing. It's a horrible thing to do, because what I do is three dimensional, and what I do is so complex in terms of the surface that I don't know how I would draw it. I don't know how I would ever be able to come upon it on a flat paper.
Alex: The surfaces are so detailed and beautiful.
Ursula: That's right. That's kind of what makes my work, the surfaces.
© Ursula von Rydingsvard, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Photograph by Andria Morales
Alex: It's really remarkable. You said you do have an idea, when you begin, how the final version of the sculpture will emerge, or does it sometimes take a different course as you're creating it?
Ursula: Yes. I have an image in my head of what I want, otherwise you can't start. Often, it ends up being something very different because the cedar was unable to do what I wanted or because what was actually happening was taking me to the wrong place or was better than what I thought I wanted, and many other reasons. The image gives me a starting point.
Alex: Does that mean that sometimes you have had a pleasant accident, created something you had not planned, and it was something better than you had hoped?
Ursula: That's right.
Alex: Your pieces are so enormous in scale. Do you do everything in your Brooklyn studio, or do you sometimes have to create the work actually at the location where it's going to be installed?
Ursula: I actually create the full-scale models in cedar and then send them to the foundry. The last one I made was 25 feet high.
Alex: Has your scale increased in size over your career?
Ursula: No. Not really. Many people think that the more you have worked, the bigger your pieces get. I made some really big pieces from the start.
It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work to say that I evolve with my work, that my work gets better and better. I don't think that that's how art works. Just because you put in more time doesn't mean that you get better. You certainly get better and better with the process. You understand the process better. You understand the materials better. You understand the options better, but that doesn't mean that you're going to do better work.
Alex: I know you said you always come back to your cedar, but you have worked in resin and other materials such as intestines and paper.
Ursula: Well, I think what ended up happening is that, probably, at least 85% of what I do is made from cedar. It's a material that works for me. There are things that I can do emotionally with the cedar that I just can't do with other materials.
Alex: Was that one of the first materials you worked with, or did you come to that later in your career? How did you discover the cedar?
Ursula: I went to Columbia University from 1973 to 1975 for my MFA. At the end of my second year, there was a monk called Michael Mulhern who was very, very kind, a wonderful man. He brought me some four-by-four beams in cedar. Of course, we didn't have any woodworking facilities at Columbia. We had a room to work in steel. This was at the very end of my second year, and I just went to town. The moment that my circular saw hit the cedar, I was like, "Oh, my god." The cedar itself felt soft. It felt like the color of skin. It was sexy. It was easy to cut, and it enabled me to make the surfaces as organic as I needed them to be… In the process I made the metal shop look like a major snowstorm hit it with all the sawdust that covered the floor.
Alex: Can you tell me a little bit about the piece that's installed at the Detroit Institute of Arts sculpture garden?
Ursula: It is a bowl, and you can hardly see it unless you see it from above. If you look down from the second or third stories, you will see it. There's a kind of very organic edge that's in a circle at the very top. It was a piece that was commissioned by an organization that does some public art in New York City, and they showed it in front of the Scholar's Entrance to Central Park.
I put these deep folds into it. I think that the scale of the work can encompass the person standing in front of it. The person can psychologically be surrounded, if one is close enough to the piece, in a way that could be potent and could feed that kind of surface with such deep dents in it. I enjoyed doing this one a lot.
Bowl with Folds, 1999. Gift of Janis B. and William M. Wetsman. © Ursula von Rydingsvard, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.
Alex: Maybe this is really an unfair question to ask an artist, because you probably love all your projects or have personal connections to them, but is there a project or installation that's been a favorite for you?
Ursula: The Philadelphia Museum just bought a piece named Droga, and it is something that spreads very long, on the floor, and it's about chest high. It was a piece that I think really came out looking wonderful. She's going to have the Philadelphia Museum of Art as her home, because they just got her.
I don't know, it is kind of hard to make a lineup, but I do have pieces that I really hate. In time, I make a pile in my upstate enormous storage building near my house. I have my assistants tape the pieces that I want to burn but am not brave enough to watch the fire destroying my art. I am not that brave. I just couldn’t stand looking at them anymore.
Just as I say that, sometimes real faults are the best thing that you do in a piece, that real detour that you had no intention of making. But that's not what I'm referring to. I'm referring to pieces that I've looked at for a long, long period of time, and they just piss me off, so I want to get rid of them.
Alex: What are you working on now?
Ursula: I have a show on now at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. It's a one-person show, and I think it's very beautiful.
I just finished an enormous bronze piece that's going to be sited very soon on the land that its supposed to go on in Bedford Hills. Not that long ago that I finished a piece for Stanford University that is in front of the Denning House. These are all huge pieces.
MOCNA, 2018. © Ursula von Rydingsvard, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. and Stanford University
I have a piece at MIT.
SCIENTIA, 2016. © Ursula von Rydingsvard, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson.
SCIENTIA, 2016. © Ursula von Rydingsvard, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson
I have a piece in the Bloomberg building -- an 88-foot piece that paces throughout the entire lobby.
Berwici Pici Pa, 2005. © Ursula von Rydingsvard, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Photograph by David Allison
Alex: I read in an interview where you talked about the influence of your European heritage, but you talked about it as this feeling of a will that comes from your background. What does that mean?
Ursula: When you go through something very intensely like living through nine different camps as a small child. One could say my childhood was not really normal, but it's a childhood that had an intensity. I was one of seven children, and we all sort of saved one another in the sense that we were all we had -- one another. What my parents had to go through in order to have no one die was a miracle. But it wasn't a miracle, because they were farmers. They were tremendously good farmers, and they were able to figure out how to keep the children fed.
Also the Marshall Plan in the United States was an extraordinary plan. I'm not sure that we would have been alive without The Marshall Plan. The food that was slated to come actually came, and it came to the right places. I have real gratitude towards General Marshall. He just fought really, really hard for it, but the most miraculous thing is that it worked.
My family went through a lot, and that's not exaggerating. There are certain things that you don't think about particularly, but they're branded in your head forever. People think that's what I think about when I make my work. That is so not true. Making my work is something that's intuitive that I dip into. My intuition. God knows where that is. I don't know, but it's not right and wrong. It's not the proper logistics. It's not the proper values. It's not something that makes sense. It's not like that. They don't count with art. Art is much, much more vulnerable, much more flighty. You can't really grab it, look at it, and say, "I got it, and this is it." It keeps kind of floating, and I don't quite know in what space or where.
For me, it's just a wonderful place to put my emotions. I don't think that, "Oh, I'm really pissed, so I'm going to be making this kind of work," or, "I'm in love, so I'm going to be making this." It doesn't work that way. It's very complex. I don't know even how to point to it, but that's the will, that's the want. And honestly, I think I would have a very difficult time living without that great, great, great opportunity to put my thoughts and everything else into my work.
Alex: We, as the audience and viewers, are grateful that you do it. It's beautiful to look at and hear you speak about it. Thank you.
Feature portrait © Ursula von Rydingsvard, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Photography by Allen Rokach
