 |
|
Elegantka II
|
On
the way to Giardini, one first comes to Giardino della Marinaressa on Riva dei
Sette Martiri, off the Grand Canal between San Marco and the Giardini, a public
park with views across the water to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. The park, used for the first time as a venue
for displaying sculpture at the Biennale, had fallen into disrepair but the Yorkshire
Sculpture Park raised funds to re-landscape the gardens and sponsored an
exhibit of Ursula von Rydingsvard's sculpture.
In all there are six sculptures, three cedar, two bronze, and one in an
icy blue resin.
 |
| San Giorgio Maggiore |
 |
|
Heart in Hand
|
Ursula
von Rydingsvard, one of America’s most fearless and distinguished artists has
honed a distinctive, highly personal approach to sculpture over the course
of a career spanning the last four decades.
She is known for creating large-scale sculpture from the cedar beams that
she painstakingly cuts, assembles, and laminates, finally rubbing powdered
graphite into the work's textured, faceted surfaces. She deliberately uses cedar boards milled into
4" by 4" widths with varied lengths that create a neutrality or
"blank canvas". Her signature
abstract shapes refer to things in the real world, each revealing the mark of
the human hand while also summoning natural forms and forces. These forms
typically include simple vessels or bowls; many suggest tools or other
artifacts such as shovels, spoons and fences, or allude to primitive dwellings,
geological formations, the landscape, or the body. Although known for her work with cedar, she
has adopted bronze and resin into her creative process in recent years, and
usually casts the bronze and resin elements from cedar, embedding into the different
media the textural idiosyncrasies of the wood as a continuation of the essence of
the original material.
 |
|
Heart in Hand
|
Ursula
von Rydingsvard was born in Deensen, Lower Saxony, then Nazi Germany, in 1942 to a
Ukrainian father and a Polish mother. Her family were among the dispossessed
that, after the war, were forced to move from one refugee camp for displaced
Poles to another, eventually settling in the United States in 1950. She is married to the neuroscientist Paul Greengard,
named one of three winners of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology, recognized his discoveries of how
nerve cells communicate with one other. Research
he did in the 1970’s provided the underlying science for the Prozac-type drugs.
It turned out that Prozac and similar drugs work, in part, by increasing levels
of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is widely believed to cause an
antidepressant action in brain cells.
Somehow I think that their dinner conversations are a bit different than
mine.
 |
| Bronze Bowl with Lace |
Speaking of dinner, Corte Sconta, recommended in
the cookbook Pulpo and known for their frutti di mare, is nearby. They offer a massive antipasti for two which
started with a mouse of roe on toast, followed by carpaccio of swordfish and
tuna with a celery root salad, followed by steamed clams, then a platter with
mantis shrimp, a fish salad, sardines, small shrimps in a tomato sauce, stuffed
octopus, and much more...
 |
| carpaccio of swordfish and tuna |
 |
| frutti di mare |
No comments:
Post a Comment