Ordered Movement: George Rickey

MARUANI MERCIER is delighted to present George Rickey: Ordered Movement, the second solo exhibition of the artist, following the gallery’s announcement of its European representation of the George Rickey Foundation earlier this year. Spanning four decades of Rickey’s practice, from 1957 to 1997, the works in the exhibition highlight an extraordinary formal range and experimentation that characterise Rickey’s spatially dynamic sculptures executed on a smaller scale. Responding to minute changes in the surrounding air currents, these delicately balanced forms evince the artist’s preoccupation with the nature of motion as a core theme in his practice. As Rickey remarked in an interview in 1968, “I think that I’ve tried to keep clear in my mind that my field is ordered movement. Whether it is in two dimensions, three dimensions, four dimensions, whether it is in colour or non-colour, my primary concern, my province is the movement.”

 

Rickey began working with movement in late 1949, proceeding to develop a body of work of meticulously calibrated sculptural forms choreographed in both space and time. Often executed in stainless steel, the glimmering yet non-reflective surfaces of Rickey’s works accentuate the movement itself, intermittently reflecting the external patterns of light and shadow. Configured from primary shapes such as lines, squares and spirals, the sculptures trace complex forms in space, accelerating and decelerating between order and asymmetry. 

 

Several works in Ordered Movement reference natural forms in their titles, such as Trastevere Flower (1957), Wild Carrot II (1958-1987) or Meander (1973), yet Rickey invariably avoided reproducing specific objects or images in his work. Instead, his abstract works reveal the underlying forces of physics and incessantly shifting vectors of motion in the natural world that we are part of. As the artist noted, “Though I do not imitate nature I am aware of resemblances. If my sculptures sometimes look like plants or clouds or waves of the sea, it is because they respond to the same laws of motion and follow the same mechanical principles.”

 

Rickey’s works extend the boundaries of the sculptural medium into the temporal dimension, inviting a reflection on the human experience of time. In works such as Two Lines Temporal (1963–69), the oscillating elements evoke clock hands, now reversing, now pausing the passage of time and thus encouraging a more conscious and extended contemplation.