George Rickey: Wall Reliefs
Kasmin Gallery, New York
January 11 – February 17, 2024
Kasmin presents a solo exhibition of work by pioneering American sculptor GEORGE RICKEY. Emphasizing wall-mounted stainless steel kinetic sculptures contextualized by the inclusion of significant free-standing examples from the early 1960s through the 1990s, the presentation draws from the collections of the George Rickey Foundation and the George Rickey Estate, represented by Kasmin since 2020, to demonstrate formal developments in the artist's singular practice over several decades.
George Rickey had begun mounting kinetic sculptures to the wall by the early 1960s, an ambition he held from the very beginning of his sculptural practice a decade prior. Working against the wall afforded Rickey the opportunity to fine tune the mechanics of his sculptural designs by hand before executing them at monumental scale, at a time when many sculptors had begun to collaborate with commercial fabricators to realize ambitious projects. His commitment to the hand-creation of his work is represented here by Atropos IV (1963, begun 1961), a unique work from one of the artist’s earliest series of line sculptures. George Rickey began his “Atropos” series in 1961, the year he learned the Heliarc welding technique that enabled him to realize his sculptural designs at an ambitious scale. Titled after the Greek goddess of fate and destiny, the movement of the two lines in Atropos IV is guided both by the artist’s intricate engineering and by chance, provided by a gentle breeze. The use of straight lines and geometric elements would soon hallmark Rickey’s ability to capture the essence of movement in his sculpture; as he once wrote, “Lines permit the most economical manifestation of movement I have found, a kinetic drawing in space.” In 1964, George Rickey exhibited monumental line sculptures at Documenta III, including a large-scale wall-mounted work from his related “Landscape” series, which anticipates Rickey’s Seascape III (1993) on view here, outside of the Orangerie in Kassel, Germany, where an early monumental vertical rendering, Two Lines – Temporal I (1964) was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.
Once George Rickey discovered the line as a tool to illustrate motion, he began experimenting with other geometric shapes such as squares, rectangles and triangles. By the 1970s, living and working between East Chatham, NY and Berlin—a city then divided by a wall, on which artwork famously flourished through the 1980s—Rickey used these shapes to create works in which light and color reflect off of their expanded surface areas in new ways. Soon enough, George Rickey would open his forms, using open frames instead of solid planes as a sculptural element, to the effect that the works frame and reframe their surrounding environments through their openings. He would further create complex patterns out of simple shapes, creating a square out of triangles in Unstable Squares Diagonal Wall (1981) or truncating triangles into trapezoids in Cascade (1989).
A highlight of the exhibition is Annular Eclipse - Wall (c. 1995), a unique work related to one of Rickey’s last major sculptures, inspired by an annular eclipse in May 1994—a type of solar eclipse in which the moon is too far from the sun to cover it completely, resulting in a ring of fire around its edge. For the first time in decades, Rickey titled this work after nature, and, in a rare instance in Rickey’s oeuvre, this artwork’s title preceded its conceptual realization. A monumental iteration of Annular Eclipse was installed along Park Avenue in 2000, inaugurating the boulevard’s public art tradition in New York, and then again at the corner of 48th Street and 6th Avenue in 2017.
George Rickey: Wall Reliefs underscores the relationship between Rickey’s wall-mounted kinetic sculptures and his documented interest in the optical effects of contemporary painting. Beginning his career as a painter, George Rickey early on honed his ability to produce artworks at a commanding scale by transforming small gridded sketches into large-scale public murals, an experience that prefigures the monumental sculptures. On a 1961 trip to Europe, around the time he began his “Atropos” series, Rickey met the artists Jesús Rafael Soto and Victor Vasarely in Paris, each known for creating optical effects of movement, and the latter of whose work Rickey would soon acquire for his personal collection. George Rickey’s research for his 1967 book Constructivism: Origins and Evolution—which dedicated a chapter to the role of optical phenomena in paintings by Bridget Riley, Vasarely, Soto, and others—would be instrumental in organizing MoMA curator William Seitz’s landmark traveling survey The Responsive Eye in 1965. As George Rickey would state about his kinetic sculptures in that year: “I've been interested in the essence of movement, not just in making objects [that] move, but in trying to use movement as an expressive means, as a painter might use color.”
KASMIN
509 West 27th Street, New York City
