George Rickey: Wall Reliefs

• "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."
  —George Rickey

"If great talents use movement, great art will move." 
—George Rickey

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, 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. 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 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.”