Ursula von Rydingsvard

Ursula von Rydingsvard, born Ursula Karoliszyn in 1942 in Deensen, Germany, is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She was born to a Polish mother and a Ukrainian father who had been forced laborers in Germany during the Second World War, and her family lived in a series of displaced persons camps in Germany before immigrating to the United States in 1950, settling in Plainville, Connecticut.

She studied at the University of New Hampshire from 1960 to 1962, then earned a BA and MA in art education from the University of Miami in 1964 and 1965. After further study at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1969 to 1970, she completed an MFA in sculpture at Columbia University in 1975. She received an honorary doctorate from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1991.

Von Rydingsvard is best known for large abstract sculptures built from cedar beams, cut, stacked, and laminated, then often rubbed with graphite, with some works later cast in bronze or resin. Critics have discussed her practice in almost musical terms, describing how a single multipartite work can hold different moods and tempos at once. She continues to exhibit actively into 2026, including a survey at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a solo show at Galerie Lelong in New York.

Von Rydingsvard has been recognized across four decades with some of the field's most significant honors, including a 1983 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1994 Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2008 Rappaport Prize, the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, the International Sculpture Center's 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts' Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2019. Her work has been the subject of major exhibitions at Storm King Art Center in 1992, the Neuberger Museum of Art in 2002, Madison Square Park in 2006, Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2014 to 2015, the Venice Biennale in 2015, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2018. Critics have repeatedly framed her cedar constructions as bridging monumental abstraction with an intensely personal record of labor, memory, and displacement rooted in her childhood in postwar refugee camps.

Von Rydingsvard's secondary market is thin relative to her institutional stature. Her auction high is Droga, which sold at Phillips, New York, in June 2021 for USD 200,000; the exact sale date has not been confirmed in available sources. Other works have traded for far less, including a wooden assemblage that sold for USD 12,300 at Skinner in 2017, a reminder that results vary widely by work, scale, and provenance. She is represented by Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York, which has also authenticated works entering the secondary market.

Von Rydingsvard's market sits well behind her institutional standing: auction appearances are infrequent, prices vary considerably by work, and there is no catalogue raisonne, which places extra weight on gallery-verified provenance. Her continuing exhibition schedule into 2026, including a museum survey and a new gallery show, points to sustained institutional demand even as the auction market remains comparatively shallow and unpredictable for individual lots.