George Rickey in New York

George Rickey was among the most inventive and influential sculptors of the twentieth century.  Rickey, along with Calder, introduced the notion of kinetic sculpture to America in the mid twentieth century.  Rickey’s kinetic works are the outgrowth of his experiments with wire and metal that began during his service in World War II. By the late 1950s and early 1960s he had defined his sculptural forms as simple, geometric shapes such as rectangles, trapezoids, cubes, and lines. Rickey created work that specifically revealed the ever-present, but unseen, elements and forces of nature. Rickey expanded the physical vocabulary of sculpture, positioning his work at the intersection of art and nature.  In his hands, art and nature are one and the same.

Rickey’s work can be found in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which hosted a retrospective of the artist in 1979, and in those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Tate Gallery. His public works remain on display in towns and cities in every part of the United States, and throughout Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.