George Rickey

George Rickey began constructing large-scale kinetic sculpture in the early 1950s after receiving encouragement and welding lessons from his colleague at the University of Indiana, David Smith.  However, unlike Smith, Rickey was not preoccupied with the static form of the sculpture, rather, as the artist noted, “since the design of the movement is paramount, shape should have no significance of itself; it merely makes movement evident.”  As a result, for over 50 years Rickey focused on his creative energies on the marvelous large-scale sculptures that subordinated form for movement. 

Four Lines Up, is a prime example of Rickey’s mature philosophy.  These great engineering marvels are paradigms of Rickey’s collaboration with the forces of nature.  Like a rolling wave, each work moves in a rhythmic yet seemingly unpredictable pattern, which recalls the positive and negative natural forces or order and chaos.  Fittingly, they are equally at home in city or country as they engage in a continually active conceptual dialogue with their surrounding world devoid of preference for greenery or cement.  Consequently. Rickey’s sculpture only asks patience from the viewer for, as Rickey scholar Nan Rosenthal observes, “the system itself – the work – speaks for itself as celebration of pure event.”