Skulpturenpark Köln

For her massive, carved wooden sculptures, Ursula von Rydingsvard (b. 1942 in Deensen/Lower Saxony) draws on a formal canon of everyday basic commodities. From this she produces puzzling abstract pieces with heavily tooled surfaces and irregular contours whose ambiguities trigger a process of free association. Like the sculpture Large Bowl, almost all of her works incorporate this intense, picture-puzzle fusion of natural and artificial forms. She emigrated in 1950, and her work was only shown for the first time in 1975 in a solo exhibition in New York. It has since been shown in numerous international museum collections and exhibitions.