Ursula von Rydingsvard
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Monumental sculpture has a way of imposing its will. It rears up and demands to be seen, often crowding out delicacy with bold gestures. Ursula von Rydingsvard’s sculptures resist the heavy-handedness of monuments. The artist works in cedar, gluing together planks and stone-shaped chunks until the wood looks pixelated, like glitchy flotsam that’s drifted onto a screen. The surfaces are coarse, scarred, and stained in places with the coal-colored sheen of graphite. Most of the sculptures are outsize indoors—the intimate galleries of the National Museum of Women in the Arts being far from the