Ursula von Rydingsvard: States of Becoming at The Bruce Museum
December 4, 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.”
10:00 – 5:00 pm,
Tuesday through Sunday
