Linda Ridgway

Art Brokerage: Linda Ridgway American Artist: b. 1947. Linda Ridgway (American, b.1947) is best known for her bronze sculptures and her installations, which look as if they were allowed to fall to the floor and assume random shapes. While she was initially trained in printmaking, Ridgway has been a daring and restless artist, always employing new mediums and finding novel ways to exploit those she has already mastered. Her bronze sculptures, which have been called delicate and dark and ethereal, have an otherworldly, uncanny quality about them, conveying emotion through a minimal language that relies on the play of line and shadow. Ridgway's preoccupations with line and with delicacy were nurtured in her personal history. According to Ridgway's biography: At her father's side, she learned how to create lines of determination - planting, growing, changing - from seed to plant to corn. Those days often ended with her mother reading to her from her favorite poets: Frost, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. The lines of poetry, planted by her mother's reading, would later become the sparks that kindled her art. Ridgway was born in Jeffersonville, Indiana in 1947. When she was 18, she began attending the Louisville School of Art in Anchorage, Kentucky. There, she was trained in printmaking. After graduating from Tulane, Ridgway moved to Dallas, intending to become both a working artist and a teacher. She continued to experiment with a variety of media but favoring bronze sculptures. As always, her works were inspired by the elegant shapes found in nature and the spare delicacy found in poetry. Her primary influences during this early part of her career were the notable postminimalist sculptor Eva Hesse and the abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. Ridgway cites a 1985 visit to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. as a formative experience and an influential moment in the development of her art. Ridgway attended an exhibition of the Swiss Surrealist Albert Giacommeta?s work, writing afterward that ?his ability to convert drawings into bronze transformed the use of that medium, giving it an ephemeral, evaporative quality never seen before. After this visit, Ridgway' own works began to assume a new grace and fragility, as well as a new philosophical heft. The critic Kevin Bouchard had this to say about a recent Ridgway exhibition: In all this work, the artist walks an emotional tightrope, trying to balance the darkest forces of nature chaos and death with nature's most unwieldy gift: human intelligence. Along the way are moments of contemplation, anger and peace. A sense of determination resonates in Ridgway's exquisite crafting of each work.