Ursula von Rydingsvard, a sculptor whose monumental objects were partly inspired by her childhood in post-World War II refugee camps, died in her Manhattan home this morning, October 27, at 84. The artist's studio manager, Courtney Childress, attributed Von Rydingsvard's death to Alzheimer's disease, according to the New York Times.
During her over five-decade career, Von Rydingsvard chipped away at enormous cedar beams to create a menagerie of massive sculptures, from an assembly of cones to a 17-foot-tall tornado-shaped behemoth made from 15,000 pounds of wood. The abstract sculptor worked with an array of other materials, including bronze, textiles, and animal intestines.
"She was like the sun. She was this force that pulled people in and kept them orbiting around her," Childress told Hyperallergic in a phone interview. "She moved through the studio like her hair was on fire, and could never slow down."
Born in 1942 in Deensen, Germany, in the midst of World War II, to a Polish mother and a Ukrainian father, Von Rydingsvard took significant inspiration from her childhood experiences. When the war ended in 1945, her family of nine navigated eight Nazi slave-labor and postwar refugee camps before taking a military ship to the United States in 1950, as she relayed in an interview with Art 21.