CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- Galerie Lelong announced the installation of Ursula von Rydingsvard’s monumental sculpture SCIENTIA (2016), a gift commissioned by Lore Harp McGovern for the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Public Art Collection of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Towering at a height of 25 feet, it is her tallest bronze sculpture to date. Von Rydingsvard first constructed a full-scale wood model from stacked 4” x 4” cedar beams, which were painstakingly cut using circular saws and hand tools, then cast in bronze. The delicate lace crown at the top is one of von Rydingsvard’s most ambitious feats to date. A thin metal web of perforations of all different sizes and shapes through which an interior light emits was engineered to give the appearance of fragility while remaining structurally sound.

SCIENTIA is a monument to science, echoing the mission of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research to understand the most complex human organ. The sculpture’s rippling vertical form is a vessel – a familiar domestic shape that von Rydingsvard has often utilized as a facilitator of safety, protection, and comfort. Patricia C. Phillips, Academic Dean at Moore College of Art & Design, says about the work:

“In front of the building, SCIENTIA bears witness to the mission of the McGovern. Its active, agitated, irrepressible beauty embodies the despair of illness and loss with the expectancy of medical innovation and scientific research. Emanating from the surfaces of the textured, dense, thick, labored, and detailed base of the vessel is a culminating radical dematerialization of form that might elicit the neural pathways of cognitive thought or materialized representation of the ways that both personal and more panoramic memories develop — and are preserved or perhaps slowly wither away through the vagaries of illness or age…Both science and art require intrepid navigation of the unknown and unimagined.”

SCIENTIA continues the artist’s recent exploration of different materials. Von Rydingsvard’s URODA (2016), which was recently installed at Princeton University, was her first sculpture featuring copper as a primary medium. SCIENTIA marks an evolution from previous bronze sculptures such as Ona (2013) at Barclays Center, New York, and Bronze Bowl with Lace (2013-14), which was shown in the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and at the Art Institute Chicago earlier this year.