George Rickey

Thomas Segal Gallery, Baltimore (acquired directly from the artist)
Private Collection, Germany
Galerie Haas & Fuchs, Berlin

La Jolla, Scott White Contemporary, Maquette to Monumental: George Rickey, January - February 2002

George Rickey, an American painter, sculptor, art historian and son of an engineer was in his 50s when he discovered the artistic mode that would bring him widespread recognition: tall stainless-steel sculptures with parts designed to be moved by wind currents. Born in South Bend, Indiana, Rickey spent his youth in Europe, attending Oxford University and studying in Paris with Fernand Leger and Amedee Ozenfant. After his return to the U.S. in the 1930s, he initially pursued painting, only switching to sculpture after the Second World War. Influenced by Alexander Calder and Russian Constructivism (the subject of a scholarly study that Rickey published in 1967), he developed a method using axles, counterweights, gears and bearings that allowed him to create structures with long, tapered bladelike forms that pivot gracefully in the wind.

It is well understood that Rickey was one of the leading exponents in the field of kinetic art. Author of Constructivism: Origins and Evolution, Rickey's primary interest was the study of movement, its choreography and shape being the essence of kinetic art. Rickey anticipated that his sculptures, moved by the force of the air, would thus express its unpredictability and variation.  With gleaming stainless steel surfaces, burnished to catch and reflect light, and engineered to react to even delicate alterations in wind currents, his sculptures fulfill their potential by interacting with the towering trees, reflective ponds, and sensuous movements of the natural environment, in a continually active conceptual dialogue with their surrounding world.

“These pieces with long blades are really just an exploitation of the simplest means I could find at the time for showing a kind of ordered and related set of movements… I have a vivid recollection of seeing a wind bell…in a neighbor's house when I was a child of perhaps seven or eight in Scotland. And I liked it very much, I liked the sound, and I liked the movement as you opened the door, and a little breeze blew in. But as far as history is concerned I think there has been a fascination, a preoccupation, a study of movement by men since the earliest times. It seems obvious that the dance, which is one of the oldest art forms, is precisely this. The order, the movement was made with human bodies rather than with metal or stone or wood, but it was organized movement and it was a very important expression in all cultures. There has been concern with movement in nature, movement of clouds, movement of water - it appears in poetry and literature - but also with moving objects.” (Interview with George Rickey, conducted by Joseph Trovato at the Artist's home in East Chatham, New York, July 17, 1965).

Many of his creations, like One Up, One Down Eccentric II, though extraordinary in its size, moves delicately with the slightest of breezes.  His large constructions challenge the viewer to consider not only the shape of the piece, but the random movements caused by air currents and the pull of gravity.  The sheer brilliance of the present work lay in the sublimely beautiful conical forms the blades infer when in full motion.   He was creating and exploring new ideas in art until his death in 2003 at the age of ninety-five which solidified his position of one of America’s most influential and important 20^th Century sculptors.