Ursula von Rydingsvard: states of becoming

The Bruce Museum
November 28, 2025 – May 10, 2026

Over the course of five decades, Ursula von Rydingsvard (American, b. Germany, 1942) has created monumental, even imposing sculptures that have an undercurrent of vulnerability. Although she has experimented with a wide variety of mediums, since the mid-1970s she has worked primarily with cedar, a soft, malleable material that can be easily manipulated to form abstract shapes. Each sculpture begins with an outline drawn directly onto the studio floor, and within this shape individual four-by-four beams of cedar are drawn, cut, stacked, and glued together. Her process is both additive and subtractive, and each cumulative layer is an intuitive response to the one before, as though the sculpture, according to the artist, “at least partially…determines its own destiny.” Indeed, von Rydingsvard strives to occupy “the intermediary space that really has no answers, that really has no specific goal…a place that’s more volatile…that isn’t so certain.”

Ursula von Rydingsvard: states of becoming is the first exhibition to explore the artist’s improvisational manner of working and long-standing practice of returning to sculptures or deliberately reworking years later. Since 2007 she has expanded her sculptural vocabulary, collaborating with the papermaking workshop Dieu Donné to produce highly dimensional pieces cast from abaca and handmade linen paper embellished with cotton, lace, and other organic materials. Like her sculptures, the works on paper embody a certain vulnerability and elusiveness, the amorphous, wet pulp fraying at the edges. Tracing von Rydingsvard’s works of the last two decades in cedar and paper through various states of evolving, unraveling, and, ultimately, becoming, this exhibition reveals the tensions between methodology and intuition, monumentality and vulnerability, and meaning and ambiguity in her practice.

Over a remarkable four-decade-long career, Ursula von Rydingsvard has become one of the most influential sculptors working today. She is best known for creating large-scale, often monumental sculpture from cedar beams, which she painstakingly cuts, assembles, and laminates before finally rubbing a graphite patina into the work’s textured, faceted surfaces. Her signature abstract shapes refer to things in the real world — vessels, bowls, tools, and other objects — each revealing the mark of the human hand while also summoning natural forms and forces. In recent years, von Rydingsvard has explored other mediums in depth, such as bronze, paper, and resin, continuing to expand upon her unique artistic vocabulary.

Von Rydingsvard’s work is represented in the permanent collections of more than four dozen museums and institutions worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minnesota; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri; Storm King Art Center, New York; and Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan. Permanent commissioned sculptures by von Rydingsvard are on view in multiple public locations including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Microsoft Corporation, Washington; Princeton University, New Jersey; Bloomberg Corporation, New York; and Barclays Center, New York; among others. Recent solo museum exhibitions include Ursula von Rydingsvard: The Contour of Feeling at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Pennsylvania and Now, She, a presentation of large-scale outdoor sculptures at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania. Von Rydingsvard was born 1942 in Deensen, Germany. She has lived and worked in New York City for over 40 years.