PORTLAND, OR.-The Portland Art Museum presents Ursula von Rydingsvard. Internationally recognized for her massive carved cedar sculptures, von Rydingsvard creates a dialogue between intimate gesture and architecture through the highly articulated and complex surfaces of her work.

In the first exhibition in the Pacific Northwest of this German-born, New York-based artist’s work, the Museum presents a major sculpture, Pod Pachą, and a series of dynamic new drawings completed during the artist’s Italian residency as a recipient of a 2007 Rome Prize. This exhibition is the first time von Rydingsvard has shown her drawings.

A mechanized work, Pod Pachą, is in a continuous state of motion as it lifts and settles in a gesture that suggests a human back bending. Hand-carved and rubbed with pigments to heighten an interplay of light and shadow, the room-sized work stands off the floor on a dozen legs that both acknowledge and deny its great weight and serve to further animate its sense of being. PPod Pachą is both temporal and timeless in its swelling impermeable cedar mass and complex flickering surfaces.

Ursula Von Rydingsvard is the seventh in an ongoing series of contemporary art exhibitions organized by Bruce Guenther, Chief Curator and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and is supported in part by the Miller Meigs Endowment for Contemporary Art.