Ursula von Rydingsvard, a sculptor who responded to the austerity of Minimalism with monumental cedar sculptures that had a distinctly human touch, died in New York on Tuesday following a battle with Alzheimer’s disease. She was 84, according to the New York Times.
Frequently using 4×4 cedar beams, von Rydingsvard crafted towering forms that appear to undulate and shift. Made of organic material, they at times even looked as though they were alive, spinning through the air like mysterious animals on the move.
When von Rydingsvard began working with cedar in the mid-1970s, Minimalism was the dominant style in New York, and in order to gain attention, sculptors often welded steel and other metals into imposing, grand forms that loomed high above viewers. Von Rydingsvard chafed against the style’s theory-driven approach and its cold sensibility. “There was no sexiness, and there wasn’t even any humanity,” she once told the curator Mark Rosenthal, who organized a 2018 show of her work at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.
Von Rydingsvard, too, learned to weld, but the method was “more frustrating than imaginable,” as she once told the critic Jason Farago. Yet she found a solution that pleased her: She applied a hot rod to a sheet of steel, allowing it to create a droplet when it met the surface. “The heat made the sheet organic in a beautiful, delicate way,” she said. “That I liked.”
Cedar came to von Rydingsvard through the painter Michael Mulhern, who purchased many 4x4s for her. She then took the wood to a metalworking studio and proceeded to slice through it, delighting in the ways that she could obtain “forms that felt like the earth, or felt fleshy,” as she put it.
As critic Rachel Wetzler wrote in Art in America in 2018, “The wood’s standardized format offsets the primordial qualities of her sculptures, which loosely suggest, among other things, fossils, rocky canyons, or cresting waves; her best works tend to exploit the animating tension between the underlying gridded structure of the stacked wood and the ragged, irregular forms she unearths.”
Tree trunks were a no go, she often clarified—her material had to be cedar 4x4s. Her stated reason was that tree trunks retain their form too well. Of the 4x4s, she said, “These are neutral. They don’t ask anything of you. They’re like a blank piece of paper.”
Von Rydingsvard’s arsenal of materials came to include silk, hair, and cow intestines, all of which she elegantly sculpted into large-scale objects that never felt domineering, even despite their size.
In her art, some critics saw references to von Rydingsvard’s biography. For example, Zakopane (1987), one of her most famous works, features sacs of wood beneath spiky protrusions above. The work’s title refers to the Polish town where von Rydingsvard’s mother was born.
But von Rydingsvard insisted that her work was only implicitly related to her lived experience. “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.”
Ursula von Rydingsvard was born in 1942 in Deensen, Germany. Her mother was Polish and her father was Ukrainian; both were peasant farmers. The Nazis conscripted her father and forced him to work at a labor camp. Once the war ended, she and her family were placed in a displaced persons camp in Germany.
In 1950, the family moved to Plainville, Connecticut, where her mother worked at a restaurant and her father took a job at a factory while also helping man an adjacent farm. Hers was a distinctly blue-collar existence, and she would later recall that, in Plainville, there was “no such thing as an artist.”
Eventually, von Rydingsvard also took a job at her mother’s restaurant. She later studied at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Miami, Coral Gables, where she respectively received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
She eventually moved to Oakland, California, with her first husband, Milton von Rydingsvard, with whom she had a daughter, Ursula Anne von Rydingsvard. She divorced him in 1973, then set off to New York with her, promptly enrolling at Columbia University’s art program.
Von Rydingsvard continued to survive under hardscrabble conditions. She lived off food stamps, and she rented an apartment on 125th Street in Harlem, which she described as “dangerous” at the time. But she also found being a single mother at in her early 30s to be a liberating experience. Finally, she could do what she wanted.
Through Columbia, she got a taste of New York’s art world. She eagerly listened to the critic Max Kozloff lecturing on Marcel Duchamp. She also studied with art historian Meyer Schapiro and artist George Sugarman. Then, after graduating in 1975, she purchased a loft in SoHo and set up a studio.
In 1981, she decamped for Brooklyn, where she remained for the rest of her career. In 1985, she married the neuroscientist Paul Greengard, who died in 2019.
Her sculptures have been shown widely, in venues ranging from the Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in England. As they received greater exposure, von Rydingsvard’s ambitions expanded, allowing her to tackle ever larger commissions.
In 2013, she premiered Ona (2013), a rippling array of cedar blocks that can still be found beneath the oculus of Brooklyn’s Barclay Center. Weighing in at 12,000 pounds and standing 19 feet tall, it has a title that translates from the Polish for “she” or “her.” She welcomed the possibility that one could easily caress her sculpture.
“I would actually love people to touch it,” she told the New York Times upon Ona’s debut. “The acid from fingers polishes it, like the Buddhas getting their bellies rubbed.”
But she also expressed reservations about the improper preservation of her work, which she wanted to feel permanent and immovable. She told Farago, “I don’t want my work to rot. Even after I’m gone.”