Ursula von Rydingsvard

Peter Murray, the founder and executive director of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, has long been an admirer of the work of the European-born, New York-based sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard, and had already secured two of her impressive sculptures as long-term loans for the park. Now he has brought more than 40 pieces by von Rydingsvard across the Atlantic to Yorkshire for the most extensive show ever of her indoor and outdoor works, including six major outdoor sculptures made especially for this event.

Born in 1942 in Germany, von Rydingsvard was the fifth of seven children of a Polish mother and Ukrainian father. Her parents had been deported from Poland for forced labour – after the end of the war the family spent five years moving between refugee camps before being allowed to emigrate to the United States.

While studying sculpture at Columbia University, New York, in the 1970s, she began to develop original techniques of creating works in wood through a combination of construction and carving. Cedar wood, which she obtains in standard, commercially-cut forms, is central to her work. Even when cedar is not the final material of the sculptures, more often than not they are made from a cedar mould.

For the first 20 years, von Rydingsvard cut all the wood herself. Now she is part of a team of four cutters, two men and two women, who use circular saws, chisels and other tools of their own devising to follow markings that the artist herself first pencils on the wood.

From early on she has applied graphite powder with a softbristled brush, and sometimes chalk or plaster, to the wood to give it subtle patinas.


Many of the monumental sculptures have an elemental quality and the appearance of rock outcrops and cliff faces, with complex, weather-worn strata, while a number of the artist’s smaller, wall-hung sculptures, to be seen in the Underground Gallery, testify to her rural heritage – on both sides of her family her forebears were peasant farmers.

Dramatically installed on a grassy rise at the entrance of the sculpture park, Bronze Bowl With Lace was finished only just in time for this exhibition. Over 20 feet high, it is described by the artist, whose creative powers are as strong as ever, as ‘the most ambitious of my life’.

Until 4 January at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield: 01924-832631, www.ysp.co.uk