Artists

Born 1907, South Bend, IN
Died 2002, St. Paul Minnesota 2002
Education 1926, Trinity College, Glenalmond, Scotland
1929, Balliol College, Oxford, England, Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford

A painter, a history teacher at The Groton School, George Rickey came to sculpture late in his career. A student of the Academie L'hote and Academie Moderne in Paris, he painted from 1930 until the late forties, when he began to make moveable structures and they elicited a vital response in him. Using stainless steel he invents dynamic forms that magically alter our perception of space. Pure, spare stainless steel shapes are activated and balanced through a system of meticulously engineered counterweights and bearings and by air currents and the pull of gravity. Whether large outdoor sculptures or small intimate table pieces these silent moving objects, Rickey continually captures and redefines space.

George Rickey is represented by many private and corporate collections and most major museums throughout the world.

• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
• Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
• National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
• Tate Gallery, London, England
• City of Cologne, Germany
• City of Hanover, Germany

George Rickey's importance to the art world is belied by the lack of literature about one of the world's most accomplished kinetic sculptors. Rickey's fascinating sculptural oeuvre spans a fifty-three-year working period (1949-2002) and is incredibly diverse. This book is concerned exclusively with the early indoor sculptures from the first 25 years of Rickey's output. With over 380 color and black and white photos covering the artist's early innovations, we get an intimate and more complete picture of his artistic diversity than ever before. This book lays a firm foundation to an understanding of Rickey's creative intentions, and carefully categorizes the works into 38 chapters. Many of the works are published here for the first time.