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George RickeyPencils and Pens1987
1987
About the Item
Pencils and Pens
Graphite on paper, 1987
Signed and dated by the artist lower right (see photo)
Condition: Excellent
Image/Sheet size: 13 5/16 x 10 11/16 inches
Rickey, a noted kinetic sculptor, was born in South Bend, Indiana. His father moved the family to Scotland. Rickey studied art in England and became an excellent draftsman. He exhibited his drawings late in his career.
Rickey's drawing are rare, usually being preliminary designs for his sculptures. A finished drawing like this example shows the artist's draftsmanship.
"Born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1907, Rickey was raised near Glasgow, Scotland. His father, a mechanical engineer, managed the Singer sewing machine company's branch in Great Britain. Rickey read modern history at Balliol College, Oxford, took classes in drawing at the Ruskin School, then studied painting in Paris at André Lhote's academy and at the Académie Moderne with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant.
During the 1930s he painted first in a Cézannesque style, later in a Depression-era, social realist mode. He supported himself by teaching at Groton and at a series of colleges and universities.
In World War II Rickey served in the Army Air Corps, testing computing instruments used by bomber gunners. The work required both mechanical skill and understanding the effects of wind and gravity on ballistics, laying the foundation of his move from painting to kinetic sculpture.
Under the G.I. Bill, Rickey studied at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and from 1948-1949 attended the Institute of Design in Chicago, an outpost of Bauhaus teaching. Intrigued by both the history of constructivist art and by the mobiles of Alexander Calder, he began creating kinetic sculptures. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Rickey developed systems of motion for his sculpture that responded to the slightest variation in air currents. Over the next three decades he developed sculpture with parts made of lines, planes, rotors, volumes, and churns, moving in paths that change from simple oscillation to conical gyrations, describing a variety of planes or volumes. Many works during this period have been large-scale public commissions for sites in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Rickey died at his home in St. Paul, Minnesota, on 17 July 2002 at the age of 95." Courtesy National Gallery of Art
- Creator:George Rickey (1907-2002, American)
- Creation Year:1987
- Dimensions:Height: 13.94 in (35.41 cm)Width: 10.69 in (27.16 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Fairlawn, OH
- Reference Number:
George Rickey
GEORGE RICKEY Born: South Bend, Indiana, 1907 Died: St. Paul, Minnesota, 2002 George Rickey spent over five decades committed to the creation of poetic and precisely-calibrated sculptures that he referred to as his “useless machines.” Of all the natural forces, it was the wind’s movement that most captured Rickey’s imagination. He once wrote, “The artist finds waiting for him, as subject, not the trees, not the flowers, not the landscape, but the waving of branches and the trembling of stems, the piling up or scudding of clouds, the rising and setting and waxing and waning of heavenly bodies.” Rickey began to devote himself to the investigation of motion in sculpture, producing dynamic works using simple geometric forms such as lines, squares, rectangles, circles, etc., in which his prodigious understanding of engineering and mechanics is demonstrable. Though the works enthusiastically collaborate with the interference of wind currents in their environment, the speed of their random movements are tempered by simple spacing and fixed arrangement of the elements. The relationship of the parts remains the same, but the dance is always changing. It is this tension that defines Rickey’s sculptures. “I think it’s important to make art that you have to wait for,” said the artist. As such, the works are able to oscillate gracefully through an infinite number of compositional iterations, engaging all aspects of the natural world around them—wind, light, rain, fog, or the lack thereof. Much of Rickey’s work was created in his studio in East Chatham, New York, where he settled in 1960. Prior to that time, the artist had lived and taught in Bloomington, IN; New Orleans, LA; New York, NY, and throughout the Midwest. His childhood, youth and college years were spent in Scotland and Britain. Aside from East Chatham he had studios in Berlin, Germany and Santa Barbara, CA. George Rickey's work is included in the permanent collections of over 150 museums worldwide, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam and Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, among many others. Key exhibitions include George Rickey: Monumental Sculptures on Park Avenue, New York (2021); A Life in Art: Works by George Rickey, Indianapolis Art Center, Indiana (2009); George Rickey: Kinetic Sculpture, A Retrospective, Vero Beach Museum of Art, Florida; Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids and McNay Art Museum, San Antonio (2007-09); George Rickey: Kinetische Skulpturen, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany (2003) and George Rickey – Retrospective Exhibition, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1979).
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