7 feet small: Von Rydingsvard sculpture set for spring debut at Rice

Malutka II will be the first piece of outdoor art on campus by a female artist

Ursula von Rydingsvard stretched her hands out like tree limbs when she spoke about the live oaks lining the campus of Rice University.

“I’ve never seen anything like them,” the sculptor said. “Each one is numbered. They’re so well cared for. It makes me feel like she will be well cared for here, too.”

Malutka II, a 7-foot piece carved from cedar and then cast in bronze, will soon occupy a space under one of the broad-canopied oaks outside Allen Center.

The “she” von Rydingsvard referred to is her newest work, Malutka II, a 7-foot piece carved from cedar and then cast in bronze, which will soon occupy a space under one of the broad-canopied oaks outside Allen Center. Only a couple of months old, the sculpture is the latest in von Rydingsvard’s four-decade body of work and the university’s newest public art acquisition.

Malutka II will be Rice’s first piece of outdoor art by a female artist when it’s installed this spring, and von Rydingsvard’s only piece on display in Houston. And although it is quite large by most measures, this is actually von Rydingsvard’s smallest sculpture to date.

“Malutka means ‘young one,’” said von Rydingsvard, who typically works on a much more massive scale, creating mammoth sculptures that stretch taller than even a live oak: Mocna, on the campus of Stanford University, is 17 feet tall; Princeton University’s Uroda is 19 feet tall.

The petite young Malutka II has an energy all its own. In contrast to many of her other sculptures, Malutka has what von Rydingsvard calls an “appendage,” sweeping out of one side like a long arm. It curves to a delicate but emphatic point that stops just above the earth below. The top of Malutka’s form looks like a defiant fist from certain angles; from others, like the crest of a wave captured at its apex.

“She’s very active,” von Rydingsvard said.

And very natural. Deviating from the minimalist style preferred by her peers at Columbia University, where she received her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1975, von Rydingsvard creates work that feels organic — and not just because she starts each piece with planks of timber.

Born in 1942 to Polish parents who toiled for years in German refugee camps, von Rydingsvard hails from a long line of “peasants” with an innate connection to the earth. This informs her work in ways that she says are subconscious. Even the way she transforms the stacked cedar planks is holistic: tracing curves and outlines onto each one as she goes, never pre-planning the sculpture’s ultimate form before it’s carved or cast.

Born in 1942 to Polish parents who toiled for years in German refugee camps, Ursula von Rydingsvard hails from a long line of “peasants” with an innate connection to the earth.

“That would take the life out of it,” she said.

The final result, in the case of Malutka II, is a piece that captures “agitation,” as von Rydingsvard puts it, but also a sense of becoming — of something churning into existence. A painstakingly applied patina — von Rydingsvard uses a blowtorch with a 2-foot blue flame to blast chemicals into the bronze once it’s cast from the cedar carving — gleams with the rusty reds and mossy greens of a canyon face or a piece of petrified wood. For something so new, it seems almost ancient.

For a work that’s von Rydingsvard’s most diminutive, it has a gravity that will fully occupy its space between Allen Center and the Cambridge Office Building. It’s a site she chose because of those sheltering oak arms, which the artist says perfectly frame and situate her sculpture.

“Ursula von Rydingsvard is one of the most important sculptors working today,” said Alison Weaver, executive director of the Moody Center for the Arts, who oversees Rice’s public art program. “We are delighted to be able to add Malutka II to Rice’s public art collection. Like the trees on campus, it will become a welcoming beacon for both students and visitors.”

Sculpture, von Rydingsvard said, is a medium much like poetry: full of meanings and metaphors that can be understood differently on each approach and by each person who views it. But her most important advice for appreciating all art is the same.

“You must submit to it,” she said.