Ursula von Rydingsvard’s new directions highlighted in Bruce Museum exhibit

Ursula von Rydingsvard, long celebrated for the abstract cedar sculptures she has carved for five decades, is the subject of a new exhibition at the Bruce Museum spotlighting where the artist has pushed her work over the past 20 years—including into the unexpected realm of hand-papermaking.

The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, will showcase 15 freestanding sculptures and wall reliefs, along with a selection of works on paper, in “Ursula von Rydingsvard: states of becoming” from December 4 to May 10. It marks her first New York-area exhibition since 2011, and the first ever in Connecticut.

Curator Margarita Karasoulas said the exhibition grew out of a 2022 studio visit, where she saw not only new cedar sculptures but also the artist’s recent forays into paper pulp—works that felt “surprising” despite von Rydingsvard’s decades of consistency in materials and process.

“It was the first time I experienced her dynamic paper pulp works in person, and these were a real discovery for me,”  Karasoulas said. “Even before the exhibition’s concept took shape, I knew I wanted to display the cedar sculptures together with the paper pulp works to demonstrate the importance of intuition and open-endedness in her practice.”

Von Rydingsvard began working at Dieu Donné, a New York organization to support artists experimenting with hand papermaking, in 2007. Karasoulas said von Rydingsvard has “enthusiastically embraced” the papermaking process and has also collaborated with master papermakers there for over a decade.