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“I start with a four-by-four cedar beam. It’s a very difficult wood to carve. The fact that it doesn’t have much of a grain enables me to use it and abuse it in ways that have a huge range of possibilities.” — Ursula von Rydingsvard

Ursula von Rydingsvard has been on our minds of late, as her monumental public sculpture Ona (2013) has been a silent observer to the protests in Brooklyn that have centered at the Barclays Center. Unlike the work of her male counterparts in the realm of large-scale sculpture, von Rydingsvard’s massive wood sculptures invite intimacy and invoke warmth – welcome characteristics in this space.

Documentary filmmaker Daniel Traub of Itinerant Pictures recently released the biopic Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own with what became a virtual premiere at Film Forum in New York. The acclaimed Into Her Own is now available to stream online, and von Rydingsvard’s work can be viewed at Galerie Lelong. Here is the trailer.

From Itinerant Pictures:

Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own is an artistic biography of one of the few women in the world working in monumental sculpture. Von Rydingsvard’s work has been featured in the Venice Biennale and is held in the collections of some of the world’s great museums, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. But she may be best-known for work in public spaces – imposing pieces painstakingly crafted with complex surfaces.

In this documentary, we go behind the scenes with von Rydingsvard, as she and her collaborators – cutters, metalsmiths, and others – produce new work, including challenging commissions in copper and bronze. […]

In conversations with curators, patrons, family, and fellow artists, we come to know von Rydingsvard as a driven but compassionate sculptor with a deep commitment to her art and the world around her.