Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture

CHECKLIST OF THE EXHIBITION Maglownica, 1995 Cedar and intestines 148 x 14 x 3 1/2 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Finger Spoon I, 2007 Cedar 105 x 36 x 12 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Ocean Floor, 1996 Cedar, graphite and intestines 36 x 156 x 132 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Droga, 2009 Cedar and graphite 54 x 120 x 218 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Krasawica II, 1998-2001 Cedar and graphite 72 x 264 x 48 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Five Lace Medallions, 2001-2007 Cedar, graphite and chalk 116 1/2 x 501 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Weeping Plates, 2005 Cedar 114 x 114 x 6 1/2 inches 128 x 101 x 8 inches Collection of a private foundation

Halo with a Straight Line, 2010 Cedar, graphite and ink 133 x 114 x 79 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Collar with Dots, 2008 Cedar and pigment 115 x 137 x 7 1/2 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Untitled (Inventory 5437), 2009 Pigment and cotton handmade paper 37 x 30 inches Courtesy of the artist and Dieu Donné, New York Untitled (Inventory 5449), 2009 Thread and linen handmade paper 35 1/2 x 38 1/2 inches Courtesy of the artist and Dieu Donné, New York Untitled (Inventory 5451), 2009 Thread, pigment and linen handmade paper 43 x 21 1/2 inches Courtesy of the artist and Dieu Donné, New York

Untitled (Inventory 5443), 2009 Pigment and cotton handmade paper 35 x 30 inches Courtesy of the artist and Dieu Donné, New York

The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum

Florida International University 10975 SW 17th St., Miami, FL 33199 t: 305.348.2890 | e: artinfo@fiu.edu | w: thefrost.fiu.edu Museum Hours: Tues-Sat: 10am-5pm / Sun: 12pm-5pm / Mon: Closed

On cover: Droga, 2009

Smithsonian Institution Affiliations Program

The Frost Art Museum receives ongoing support from the Steven and Dorothea Green Endowment; the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor and the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners; The Miami Herald; Target; the Members & Friends of The Frost Art Museum.

Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture is organized by SculptureCenter. The exhibition and its tour are made possible with the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Agnes Gund.

Cedar and graphite 54 x 120 x 218 inches Courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong Photo: Rosalyn and Michael Bodycomb

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

Weeping Plates, 2005 Cedar Left: 114 x 114 x 6 1/ 2 inches Right: 128 x 101 x 8 inches Collection of a private foundation Installation view, SculptureCenter

This long-awaited exhibition of the monumental sculptures of Ursula von Rydingsvard will be the first opportunity for the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum to install works that enhance its dramatic and challenging spaces, while paying tribute to one remarkable artist. Born Urszula Karoliszyn in Deensen, Germany, of a Polish mother and Polish-speaking Ukrainian father, war forced her family into refugee camps in Germany where they survived under difficult circumstances that would forever mark her life and her work. For over thirty years, von Rydingsvard has constructed large cedar works by cutting, stacking, gluing and clamping modules into majestic forms that speak of her personal experiences, centuries-old traditions. Replete with references to the history of art, memory, identity and the functions of the mind, each work explores time and environmental space, with which the

The exhibition was recently honored with the U.S. section of the International Association of Art Critics' annual award for Best Show in a Non-Profit Gallery or Space for its premiere at the SculptureCenter, NY. We are grateful to the SculptureCenter for including the Frost Art Museum in its traveling schedule, and to the curator Helaine Posner for her thoughtful analysis of each work. Most of all, we are grateful to Ursula von Rydingsvard for allowing us to share her extraordinary creations and introduce the university and Florida communities to works that command such timeless authority and presence.

Carol Damian Director Frost Art Museum

viewer is invited to interact and confront a personal experience of the self. The raw power of her work resonates with a message as intimate as it is universal, and as mysterious as the past that dwells within the soul of each stately formation.

Photo: Rosalyn and Michael Bodycomb

CURATOR’S STATEMENT Ursula von Rydingsvard works on a monumental scale. For over thirty years she has constructed sculpture of cedar, a soft, fragrant wood, which she painstakingly cuts, stacks, glues, and clamps, finally rubbing powdered graphite into the roughly textured surfaces to create works of enormous grandeur and stirring intimacy. Built slowly and incrementally from thousands of small cedar blocks, each work reveals the mark of the artist’s hand, her respect for physical labor, and deep trust of intuitive process. Her signature shapes are abstract yet refer to things in the real world from the modest to the majestic. These forms typically suggest domestic objects such as spoons, plates, and bowls; shovels, axes and other farm tools; women’s bonnets and lace collars; and vernacular architecture including barns, barracks, and fences. Her work also evokes great natural forms, from a craggy cliff side to a deep canyon, and phenomena, such as the forces of wind and water or the formation of the earth’s strata. Von Rydingsvard consistently endows each sculpture with tremendous dignity. In her hands, familiar forms become archetypal objects.

Von Rydingsvard regards her love of wood as part of her history.

She comes from a long line of Polish peasant farmers for whom wood provided basic shelter and tools to work the land. Her characteristic form is the bowl in its simplicity and variety. It appears in her work as a wide, shallow basin whose physical gravity recalls the Ocean Floor (1996); as the five voluptuous bowls that comprise Krasawica II (1998-2001), Ukrainian for a beautiful young woman, whose overall shape conveys a fluid sense of movement despite its weighty volume; and as the ruptured, towering form of Halo with a Straight Line (2010), an imposing sculpture that simultaneously intimidates and embraces.

In von Rydingsvard’s work a pair of huge, wall-mounted plates may weep (Weeping Plates, 2005), and the enormous, horizontal, torqued shape of Droga (2009), undulates across the floor as the artist makes cedar flow like soft fabric. In sculptures filled with contradiction, the artist succeeds in expressing something raw and elemental with remarkable sophistication and grace.

Helaine Posner Guest Curator

Ocean Floor, 1996 Cedar, graphite and intestines 36 x 156 x 132 inches Courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong Installation view, SculptureCenter Photo: Jason Mandella

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

Weeping Plates, 2005 Cedar Left: 114 x 114 x 6 1/ 2 inches Right: 128 x 101 x 8 inches Collection of a private foundation Installation view, SculptureCenter

This long-awaited exhibition of the monumental sculptures of Ursula von Rydingsvard will be the first opportunity for the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum to install works that enhance its dramatic and challenging spaces, while paying tribute to one remarkable artist. Born Urszula Karoliszyn in Deensen, Germany, of a Polish mother and Polish-speaking Ukrainian father, war forced her family into refugee camps in Germany where they survived under difficult circumstances that would forever mark her life and her work. For over thirty years, von Rydingsvard has constructed large cedar works by cutting, stacking, gluing and clamping modules into majestic forms that speak of her personal experiences, centuries-old traditions. Replete with references to the history of art, memory, identity and the functions of the mind, each work explores time and environmental space, with which the

The exhibition was recently honored with the U.S. section of the International Association of Art Critics' annual award for Best Show in a Non-Profit Gallery or Space for its premiere at the SculptureCenter, NY. We are grateful to the SculptureCenter for including the Frost Art Museum in its traveling schedule, and to the curator Helaine Posner for her thoughtful analysis of each work. Most of all, we are grateful to Ursula von Rydingsvard for allowing us to share her extraordinary creations and introduce the university and Florida communities to works that command such timeless authority and presence.

Carol Damian Director Frost Art Museum

viewer is invited to interact and confront a personal experience of the self. The raw power of her work resonates with a message as intimate as it is universal, and as mysterious as the past that dwells within the soul of each stately formation.

Photo: Rosalyn and Michael Bodycomb

CURATOR’S STATEMENT Ursula von Rydingsvard works on a monumental scale. For over thirty years she has constructed sculpture of cedar, a soft, fragrant wood, which she painstakingly cuts, stacks, glues, and clamps, finally rubbing powdered graphite into the roughly textured surfaces to create works of enormous grandeur and stirring intimacy. Built slowly and incrementally from thousands of small cedar blocks, each work reveals the mark of the artist’s hand, her respect for physical labor, and deep trust of intuitive process. Her signature shapes are abstract yet refer to things in the real world from the modest to the majestic. These forms typically suggest domestic objects such as spoons, plates, and bowls; shovels, axes and other farm tools; women’s bonnets and lace collars; and vernacular architecture including barns, barracks, and fences. Her work also evokes great natural forms, from a craggy cliff side to a deep canyon, and phenomena, such as the forces of wind and water or the formation of the earth’s strata. Von Rydingsvard consistently endows each sculpture with tremendous dignity. In her hands, familiar forms become archetypal objects.

Von Rydingsvard regards her love of wood as part of her history.

She comes from a long line of Polish peasant farmers for whom wood provided basic shelter and tools to work the land. Her characteristic form is the bowl in its simplicity and variety. It appears in her work as a wide, shallow basin whose physical gravity recalls the Ocean Floor (1996); as the five voluptuous bowls that comprise Krasawica II (1998-2001), Ukrainian for a beautiful young woman, whose overall shape conveys a fluid sense of movement despite its weighty volume; and as the ruptured, towering form of Halo with a Straight Line (2010), an imposing sculpture that simultaneously intimidates and embraces.

In von Rydingsvard’s work a pair of huge, wall-mounted plates may weep (Weeping Plates, 2005), and the enormous, horizontal, torqued shape of Droga (2009), undulates across the floor as the artist makes cedar flow like soft fabric. In sculptures filled with contradiction, the artist succeeds in expressing something raw and elemental with remarkable sophistication and grace.

Helaine Posner Guest Curator

Ocean Floor, 1996 Cedar, graphite and intestines 36 x 156 x 132 inches Courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong Installation view, SculptureCenter Photo: Jason Mandella

CHECKLIST OF THE EXHIBITION Maglownica, 1995 Cedar and intestines 148 x 14 x 3 1/2 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Finger Spoon I, 2007 Cedar 105 x 36 x 12 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Ocean Floor, 1996 Cedar, graphite and intestines 36 x 156 x 132 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Droga, 2009 Cedar and graphite 54 x 120 x 218 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Krasawica II, 1998-2001 Cedar and graphite 72 x 264 x 48 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Five Lace Medallions, 2001-2007 Cedar, graphite and chalk 116 1/2 x 501 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Weeping Plates, 2005 Cedar 114 x 114 x 6 1/2 inches 128 x 101 x 8 inches Collection of a private foundation

Halo with a Straight Line, 2010 Cedar, graphite and ink 133 x 114 x 79 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Collar with Dots, 2008 Cedar and pigment 115 x 137 x 7 1/2 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong

Untitled (Inventory 5437), 2009 Pigment and cotton handmade paper 37 x 30 inches Courtesy of the artist and Dieu Donné, New York Untitled (Inventory 5449), 2009 Thread and linen handmade paper 35 1/2 x 38 1/2 inches Courtesy of the artist and Dieu Donné, New York Untitled (Inventory 5451), 2009 Thread, pigment and linen handmade paper 43 x 21 1/2 inches Courtesy of the artist and Dieu Donné, New York

Untitled (Inventory 5443), 2009 Pigment and cotton handmade paper 35 x 30 inches Courtesy of the artist and Dieu Donné, New York

The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum

Florida International University 10975 SW 17th St., Miami, FL 33199 t: 305.348.2890 | e: artinfo@fiu.edu | w: thefrost.fiu.edu Museum Hours: Tues-Sat: 10am-5pm / Sun: 12pm-5pm / Mon: Closed

On cover: Droga, 2009

Smithsonian Institution Affiliations Program

The Frost Art Museum receives ongoing support from the Steven and Dorothea Green Endowment; the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor and the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners; The Miami Herald; Target; the Members & Friends of The Frost Art Museum.

Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture is organized by SculptureCenter. The exhibition and its tour are made possible with the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Agnes Gund.

Cedar and graphite 54 x 120 x 218 inches Courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong Photo: Rosalyn and Michael Bodycomb