George Rickey made things move, for movement was the central element of the American sculptor, an artist who was one of the most important representatives of kinetic art in which creative inspiration and technical understanding were uniquely combined.
(...) Continue readingGeorge Rickey – Inspiration from David Smith and Alexander Calder
George Rickey was born in South Bend Indiana on 6 June 1907. The son of an engineer, he spent his childhood and youth in Scottish Helensburgh where he attended Glenalmond College. After studying history, Rickey travelled through Europe and decided to study art in Paris, which he finalised in 1930. On his return to the USA, he worked for a time as a teacher and practiced portrait drawing in his spare time. He enrolled in the US Army as an engineer in 1942 and on his release continued studying art in New York and Chicago, followed by teaching posts at various colleges. It was whilst at Indiana University that he met the sculptor David Smith whose work made a lasting impression on him. The seed for his career as a sculptor was planted and came to initial fruition in 1945 when, inspired by the art of Alexander Calder, Rickey designed his early mobiles. He was motivated by a fascination for movement which he sought to achieve with respect of the laws of nature, thus dispensing with the use of auxiliary motors, such as those employed by Jean Tinguely.
The artist as technician; movement as artwork
In the 1950s, George Rickey turned definitively to sculpture, which he exercised not only as an artist but also an engineer. For it was not static art to which Rickey dedicated his creative power, but dynamic movement, which he sought to capture and make visible through ingenious technical constructions. In doing so, the technical groundwork he had acquired early on from his father came in very handy, as Rickey, the artist, repeatedly encountered technical difficulties that only Rickey, the engineer, could solve – a fact of which he was proud, and never forgot to highlight that this talent ran in the family, because his grandfather had been a watchmaker. Despite his own expertise, the artist worked with external engineers on particularly extensive projects, although he was not always happy with the results as the hired assistants sometimes found it difficult to follow George Rickey’s visions.
George Rickey also had success as an art theorist
George Rickey observed movement in nature and studied it at every chance - if he deemed it opportune, he would hold his work out the window of a fast car into the head wind. He processed any acquired findings not only practically, but also in important works of art theory: his treatise, Constructivism: Origins and Evolution, is considered a standard work. Rickey took part in Documenta in Kassel three times, was a member of the National Academy of Design, and also sold numerous artworks to Germany, in particular Berlin, where he had spent a year between 1968 and 1969 on a scholarship. The public protest against his sculpture Three Rotating Squares led to the recurring exhibition Skulptur Projekte in Münster.
George Rickey died in Saint Paul, Minnesota on 17 July 2002.
George Rickey - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
