From April 21 through August 5, 2012.

The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University (FIU) is pleased to present Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture. This traveling exhibition includes a selection of the artist's most significant sculptures, including wall reliefs and monumental cedar works created from 1991 to 2009. The exhibition was recently honored with the U.S. section of the International Association of Art Critics' annual award for Best Show in a Non-Profit Gallery or Space for its premiere at the SculptureCenter, NY. The exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, April 21, 2012 at 4:00 pm with a Green Critics’ Lecture featuring von Rydingsvard at FIU’s Green Library, Room 100. This lecture will be followed by an exhibition preview and reception at the Frost Art Museum immediately afterward.

Von Rydingsvard is renowned for creating large-scale, often monumental sculpture from cedar beams which she painstakingly cuts, assembles, glues, clamps and laminates, finally rubbing powered graphite into the work’s textured surfaces. Her signature shapes are abstract, with references to things from the real world. Drawing on a range of sources, from the humble to the majestic, von Rydingsvard’s work is recognized for its great psychological force and powerful physical presence. Von Rydingsvard's most enduring form is the bowl, which may appear as a shallow or towering form, and may alternately evoke nourishment, domesticity, the body, a simple enclosure, or a mountain, among other references. The exhibition includes the five undulating bowls that make up Krasawica II (1998-2001), Ukrainian for beautiful young woman, whose overall shape conveys a fluid sense of movement and vitality despite its substantial, weighty volume, as well as the large, low basin, ringed with bulbous, stuffed-intestinal forms, whose primal, physical gravity recalls the Ocean Floor (1996).

Ursula von Rydingsvard's first solo exhibition was presented in New York in 1975 and she has been exhibiting her work in museums and galleries internationally ever since. Her sculpture is included in the permanent collections of over thirty museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and Detroit Institute of Arts. Major permanent commissions of her work are view at the Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington; the Bloomberg Building, New York; and the Queens Family Courthouse, New York. Mad. Sq. Art: Ursula von Rydingsvard was presented at Madison Square Park in 2006.

Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture is organized by SculptureCenter and guest-curated by Helaine Posner. The exhibition and its tour are made possible with the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Agnes Gund.

The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum
10975 SW 17th Street
Miami, FL 33199
305.348.2890
http://thefrost.fiu.edu