Ursula von Rydingsvard
The titles of von Rydingsvard’s 14 works at the Chicago Cultural Center–the show surveys her two-decade career–are similarly allusive, referring to individuals, man-made objects, and natural features, sometimes within a single work, such as Lace Mountains (1989). This eight-foot-square, three-foot-deep wall of wood has seven thin vertical ridges in its upper portion jutting out toward the viewer. If these are mountains, they form a rather repetitive range, and the landscape they “rise” from has been rotated 90 degrees. More obviously, the ridges suggest very rough human profiles. And while the sides of the piece are smooth and the back is relatively flat, the front surface is extremely rough. The outlines of individual boards remain, but von Rydingsvard has carved out multiply angled surfaces, sawing away tiny pieces of each board to create irregular facets every few inches–a surface common in her work.
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Lace Mountains seems to refer to both mountains’ erosion and wood’s decay. In an interview, von Rydingsvard spoke of her interest in walls that “erode in a way where there is no longer a strict line between that which man has made and that which nature has made.” And one of the key ambiguities in this piece is whether we’re viewing the disintegration of natural forms–mountains–or of a precisely limned man-made object. But in any case there’s a kind of beauty to von Rydingsvard’s dynamic cuts, her tiny forest of angled planes. Combined with the way the piece imposes itself on the surrounding space, these cuts suggest not only decay but growth–the accretion of related parts found in architecture. The cuts not only subtract from the original wood but create a new, more powerful form–a surface whose rawness suggests a work in progress, unfinished and thus still open to interpretation.
Seen in this light, her work suggests the emotional extremes of a child under stress, the terrible dualities that result from displacement; in Krasavica especially the contradiction between shelter and exposure seems autobiographical. The outsize quality of much of von Rydingsvard’s work–giant versions of ordinary objects–also suggests that childhood memories inform her sculpture, rendering objects larger-than-life. While memory is often not her conscious source–reportedly Krasavica was inspired by some cast-iron Japanese stirrups she saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art–von Rydingsvard nevertheless often returns to the suggestion of a fantastic and perhaps nighmarish childhood.
