![]() ![]() The lightly grained wood is colored with graphite before the components are assembled into forms, often 10 feet tall or higher, that engage a viewer as animistic emissaries from the natural world.īorn in Germany to a Polish mother and Ukrainian father, she began her childhood in refugee camps after World War II, before her family of nine immigrated to the United States and settled in Connecticut. ![]() ![]() In this exhibition of sculptures and drawings, most of them made in the last two years, you feel the effort (carried out by assistants under her close supervision) that goes into the cutting of blocks of her favorite material, Western red cedar. At 80, the Brooklyn-based sculptor is at the top of her hard-fought game. The tension in Ursula von Rydingsvard’s wood sculpture arises from its yin-and-yang coupling of brute strength with refined delicacy. It looks born of struggle, as if wrestled into being, yet it hangs open and light, almost dancing on the wall. My favorite piece, an untitled work (2022) from the “Torção” (“Twists”) series, is a mix of media and fabrics wrapped, sewn and tied together to form a loose web. If Gomes has a central theme, that may be it: a sense of willful connection, a determination to use what’s on hand to forge something unexpectedly beautiful. In the “Tela-Corpo” (“Canvas-Body”) series, bulges of cloth emerge from canvases painted with biomorphic forms - protrusions that feel integrated, despite being disruptive. In the series “Entre Pérola e Vergalhão” (“Between Pearl and Rebar”), pearls are embedded in clusters of colorful cushions that sit atop rebar - a metaphor for creating nurturing spaces (and shoring them up). Gomes uses found and donated objects and textiles, often twisting, stretching and bundling them to create wiry or knotty forms. Rather than a retrospective, it’s an assembly of recent work that demonstrates both the range of her approaches to fabric and her mastery of it. Now, Gomes, 74, is having her first solo show in New York, titled “ O Mais Profundo é a Pele” (“Skin Is the Deepest Part”). She’d been deconstructing and reassembling fabrics since childhood, but facing prejudices as an Afro-Brazilian woman working with textiles, she thought of what she did as craft. Sonia Gomes didn’t go to art school until age 45. ![]()
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