George Rickey

George Rickey Three Lines Up Staggered 1990 Kinetic stainless steel sculpture made of 3 movable blades Height of suspension with plinth about 120 cm. Blade length 64 cm each. Signed, dated and numbered 'Rickey 1990' incised on the plinth. Copy 2/3 - With minor signs of age. The present work is registered in The George Rickey Estate, East Chatham. Provenance Maxwell Davidson Gallery, New York (1990); Private collection, Bavaria. George Rickey was a close observer of nature. Since the early 1960s, the structure of a young tree, its ramifications, and the quiet movements of its branches caused by the wind were the inspiration for the son of an engineer and the starting point for his early kinetic metal sculptures. Based on the insights gained in this way, Rickey designed basic shapes and basic structures of lines and surfaces, which he assembled, following the laws of gravity, into seemingly simple, in reality highly complex, moving constructions. "For the kinetic artist, too," Rickey wrote in 1970, "nature is omnipresent and constantly touches him. [...] Nature has presented to the artist's eye the landscape, figure, and still life-as well as geometry, light, and mediating space [...]. It is not in the imitation of appearance that kinetic art makes use of 'nature', but in the recognition of regularities, in the awareness of analogies and in the correspondence to the comprehensive repertoire of movement in space." (quoted from Eberhard Roters, George Rickey, a portrait, in: Wieland Schmied, George Rickey, St. Gallen 1976, p. 11). The sculpture on offer, "Three Lines up Staggered," belongs to the group of "Lines and Blades" created since 1961, in which Rickey combined and balanced one, two, or three movable needles. Like hardly any other group of works, it embodies the idea of a moving coordinate system whose lines constantly form new constellations. Continuously changing images are thus created before our eyes.