Stones are sentient entities to the Swedish-born artist Ulla Novina, who restores to them a gravity, a grace, and a majesty that has eluded most other sculptors in recent decades.
Although adamantly abstract, her massive monolithic slabs speak volumes about our origins, evoking totems, tablets, and runes, as well as severely simplified symbolic human forms possessed of powerful primal presences.
Encountering a group of Novina’s pieces in a gallery, one can almost imagine her chisel as a magic wand with which she can conjure at will the spirits of her Viking ancestors, along with those of other long vanished civilizations, revitalizing them by virtue of a singularly sophisticated contemporary sensibility.
Ed McCormack, Managing Editor
Gallery & Studio
As Ulla Novina sees it, a sculptor can take one of two paths. One is concerned with creating beauty, the other, the one taken by Novina, is both more ancient and more urgent. She sees as early antecedents manifestations such as imprints of hands on rocks faces made by Paleolithic peoples and slabs of rock that contain Viking runes-things that declare, "I am here.”
William Zimmer, Art Critic
The New York Times
It really become an endless analysis and visual delight moving through the piece and seeing how the different textures cutting and gluing on against the basic form. The work has a nice elemental feeling.
Joseph Jacobs, Curator of American Art
The Newark Museum
...I see a kinship with Noguchi and Noguchi’s sense of textures and the inherent values of the stone. These aesthetics are interpreted in a highly personal and beautiful fashion.
Andre Emmerich
Emmerich Gallery (now Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art), New York, NY
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