Alex Colard

GSA Gallery – Ursula von Rydingsvard – January 13 to February 19, 2022 – Hudiksvallsgatan 6, Stockholm

Open Tuesday to Friday 11.00 – 18.00, Saturday 12.00 – 16.00

ABOUT the artist
Von Rydingsvard was born in Deensen, Germany in 1942 to a Polish mother and Ukrainian father. As a young child, the artist and her six siblings experienced the German occupation of Poland and the trauma of World War II, followed by five years in eight different German refugee camps for displaced Poles. In 1959, through the U.S. Marshall Plan and with the assistance of Catholic agencies, her family of peasant farmers boarded a ship to the United States where they eventually settled in Plainville, Connecticut. She received a BA and MA from University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida in 1965 and an MFA from Columbia University in New York City in 1975. In the late 1970s, she was part of NYC’s Cultural Council Foundation Artists’ Project, which was funded under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA).
Major permanent commissions of her work are on view at the Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA; Storm King Art Center, New York; the Bloomberg Building, New York; the Queens Family Courthouse, New York; the Nelson-Atkins, Kansas City, and the Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York. Mad. Sq. Art: Ursula von Rydingsvard was the outdoor solo exhibition presented at Madison Square Park in 2006.
In 2008, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters along with being featured in Art:21 Art in the Twenty-First Century on PBS. A monograph on her work titled The Sculpture of Ursula von Rydingsvard was published by Hudson Hills Press in 1996 and in 2011 Prestel published Ursula von Rydingsvard: Working. In 2014-2015 Ursula von Rydingsvard had her first British show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (West Yorkshire, UK), her most extensive exhibition to date. The exhibition was accompanied by the Ursula von Rydingsvard 2014 Catalogue, a major publication featuring text by Molly Donovan, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
https://ursulavonrydingsvard.net/

ABOUT the exhibition
GSA Gallery is honored to present Ursula von Rydingsvard’s first solo exhibition in Sweden. The American artist is widely regarded as one of today’s most distinguished sculptors, and one of the few working on a monumental scale. Sculptures in both cedar and bronze, accompanied by works on linen paper, display a cross-section of her oeuvre and ever-expanding visual vocabulary.

During a career that spans over four decades, von Rydingsvard has developed uniquely recognizable forms that intertwine the abstract and the figurative. The artist is best known for large-scale cedar sculptures, whose labor-intensive creation requires a combination of intuition and precise methodology. Cedar is chosen because it has no grain, unlike other wood, providing a neutral starting point.

More recently, von Rydingsvard has started integrating other materials, such as bronze, resin or paper, further expanding her exploratory process. In a wider sense, her oeuvre examines psychological and emotional themes – von Rydingsvard’s manner of giving outward form to an emotion.

The current presentation showcases works from the past decade – allowing the viewer a glimpse of most current developments while emphasizing signature elements. The latter include the use of cedar, the “bowl” shapes and her extensive lexicon of surfaces, or the use of untranslated Polish titles.

The works on paper attest foremost to the artist’s fascination with fabrics and threads. Their organic imagery is created through threads of material and powdered black pigment, applied onto hand-made paper. Various patterns and degrees of transparency emerge while the use of pigment is reminiscent of the graphite applied onto the surface of the cedar sculptures. In the five works on display, the threads hang below their bottom edge, the material almost becoming the content of the works.

ABOUT the gallery
GSA Gallery (previously named Galleri Andersson/Sandström) was founded in 1980 and is today owned and operated by Stefan Andersson. The gallery focuses on international contemporary art and represents both well-established names and young emerging artists. The gallery has a special interest in outdoor sculpture and public commissions. The Umeå gallery is located in the city center of Umeå, next to the river and Kulturhuset Väven. Our visiting address is Västra Strandgatan 9. Currently we are not having any public exhibitions planned and we are therefore open by appointment only.

GSA Gallery opened its second venue, in the gallery district in Stockholm’s Vasastan, in 2008. In the summer of 2012 the gallery moved to a 500 square meter space in the same neighborhood. In August 2015 the gallery opened an additional showroom of 135 sqm and in 2017 we added another 180 sqm showroom on Hudiksvallsgatan 4, making us the largest gallery space in Sweden.

Since 1994, the gallery has worked together with real estate company Balticgruppen in Umeå to arrange one of Europe’s most important sculpture parks, Umedalens Skulpturpark, and in 2016 we initiated a project together with the Royal Djurgården Administration where we during summer presented solo exhibitions at Djurgården in Stockholm. The starting year we showed Tony Cragg, 2017 the honor went to Eva Hild, and in 2018 works by Jaume Plena were exhibited. From 2020 onwards Prinsessan Estelles Kulturstiftelse has taken over this project.

The gallery has a unique and diverse exhibition program in Stockholm and also participates in a number of international art fairs.

Stockholm
Hudiksvallsgatan 6
113 30 STOCKHOLM
SWEDEN

Regular opening hours:
Tue–Fri 11–18
Sat 12–16
The gallery is closed on all major holidays

Phone:+46 (0)8 32 49 90
E-mail: galleri@gsa.se

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