Drawing in Space: George Rickey

MARUANI MERCIER is pleased to present George Rickey: Drawing in Space, an exhibition of important works by a pioneering figure in kinetic sculpture, spanning four decades of Rickey’s artistic production. From the early suspended mobiles of the 1950s, to the geometric compositions of lines and planes characteristic of the artist’s later work, Drawing in Space highlights Rickey’s preoccupation with the natural laws of motion and the temporal dimension of the sculptural medium.

 

Employing increasingly complex mechanisms throughout his career, Rickey constructed precisely calibrated sculptural works which move with quiet, poetic deliberation. Having turned to sculpture in the early 1950s, the artist soon began using gyroscopic forms of movement, constructing mechanisms that responded to the slightest fluctuations in air currents. Executed in stainless steel, the elements in Rickey’s kinetic works rotate, extend and pleat in the air, projecting a sense of weightlessness and unrestrained motion in a landscape. In Column of Five Lines with Gimbal II (1990), the elegant tapering linear elements fluctuate and intersect, evoking the stems or tree branches swaying in the wind. Flowing lines form multitudinous possibilities of conversation within the piece, making visible the interrelating patterns of natural forces. As the artist noted, “The sculpture does not represent nature, it is nature - nature’s forces at work in the air... in gravity, in friction, in the laws of motion.”

 

Painstakingly adjusting the mechanisms in the work, Rickey located the complete freedom and unbridled randomness of motion of individual elements. In effect, each sculpture appears to operate in four dimensions, across both space and time. In Two Lines Temporal (1963-69), the forms resemble the hands of a clock, almost humorously reversing and accelerating the passage of time through movement in space. Unfolding over time, the trajectory of lines and planes invites extended looking, pointing at the temporal dimension of aesthetic experience. As Rickey later remarked, “I think it’s important to make art that you have to wait for.”