Lot 56 D

George Rickey was a close observer of nature. The structure of a young tree, its branches and its quiet movements in the wind have been the inspiration and starting point for the son of an engineer’s early kinetic metal sculptures since the beginning of the 1960s. With the thus won knowledge, Rickey designed basic shapes and structures of lines and areas which he assembled, following the laws of gravity, into seemingly simple, in reality highly complex, mobile constructions. “For the kinetic artist also,” Rickey wrote in 1970, “nature is omnipresent and touches him constantly. […] Nature has presented the landscape, the figure, and still life – as well as geometry, light, and mediating space – to the artist’s eye [...]. 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, ein Porträt, in: Wieland Schmied, George Rickey, St. Gallen 1976, p. 11).
The sculpture on offer “Three Lines up Staggered” pertains to the group of works “Lines and Blades” created from 1961 onwards, in which Rickey combined one, two, or three needles with one another, and balances them out. 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 in front of our eyes.