Ursula von Rydingsvard
States of Becoming
at the Bruce Museum, CT
by William Corwin, May 7, 2026
Book with No Words, 2017, cedar and linen
States of Becoming opens with Ursula von Rydingsvard’s Book with No Words (2017), a tome whose pages are thin slats of cedar adhered to swathes of linen. While very book-like, it is a segmented and organic creature which lives and breathes through the wood grain but has a soft side emerging from the warp and weft of the textile; handling the object may leave the inattentive reader with splinters, it can clearly defend itself. It also falls into the artistic genre of forbidden texts, like Anselm Kiefer’s lead books, or Siah Armajani’s crossed-out dictionary. Poised at the start of a 20 year survey of Rydingsvard’s work, Book with no words succinctly encapsulates the earthy materiality of her sculpture and their transgressive and amorphous energy—a simultaneity of life and danger, as well as a subtext of the exhibition which is her work with paper (though ironically this book has no paper).
Von Rydingsvard’s process of gluing together identical spars of cedar, like lining up the slats in her book, and then re-cutting these conglomerations into rough-yet-fluid growing and writhing forms plays with a notion of reverse-engineering nature. Heart in Hand (wood model) (2014) is a reptilian, ridged, and rising sprout which curves back onto itself. The artist can create lop-sided, imbalanced, and tessellated constructions by collaging smaller regular forms together. She doesn’t hack away at the natural tree trunk, playing a game of artist-versus-nature, but plans a new meta-shape, and as the piece is worked, the pattern of repeating wood grain negates the radiating rings that we would expect from such chunky carved wooden sculptures, yielding an alien life-form. Crossed Mirage (2011) is a variation on this format as a wall-based entity—neatly squared off on the edges, but seemingly creeping out towards us. In Exploding Bowl, Von Rydingsvard sees how fragile she can make her forms via her process: the lip of the bowl uncomfortably fits into the matrix of hewn units which almost float in their lightness and precarity.
Novina, 2021, cedar and graphite
The oscillation between the inherent geometry of this hybrid medium and the relentless messy life-forces that the artist releases with her chisel comes to a climax in Novina (2021), a wall-mounted very high relief of 34 barnacle shaped yawning maws lurching outwards at the viewer. Von Rydingsvard has again neatened the edges of the underlying rectangular form, but on the lower left hand corner she allows the wooden corner to melt outwards—the beast has escaped its frame. ZGINEŁA (2017-19) is a tall irregular cylindrical form which leans tepidly against the wall, but sends forth a twisted two-fingered tentacle, threatening to trip or grab hold of the ankle. The body of the form is not solid but is instead a curled membrane that presents not a thick solid but an enclosed space. The sensibility in the works is movement, growth, and space that are not filled but instead protected, defensive or defensible—this is the rejection of the phallic. There are also gargantuan hair combs; Untitled (Brush) (2000) and Włosy (2021) which also emphasize the feminine energies present.
How do the works on paper fare in the presence of the hewn and grainy textures of the heavy and insistent wood sculpture? The paper becomes skin for the most part—remnants shed by these arboreal dinosaurs. Untitled (2014-23), and Untitled (2014) are a wooden piece, a rectangular plank with dozens of semi-regular nobules, adjacent is an ethereal paper impression of the wooden form. The work in wood is dry and threatening, like a taxidermied length of tyrannosaur flesh. Its paper twin is light, and its impermanent impressions seem to plead with the viewer to reach out and feel the delicious brittleness—the complete opposite of the solid sculpture. This lightness is brief though—Von Rydingsvard primarily does heavy, but in the expansive gallery of the Bruce Museum, her looming encroaching beasts have ample room to exert their gravitational pull on the viewer, and then pass us on to the next timber behemoth.
Curated by Margarita Karasoulas, Catalogue by Margarita Karasoulas, with essays by Nora Lawrence and Robert S. Mattison
ZGINEŁA, 2017-19, cedar and graphite