George RICKEY

Double L Excentric Gyratory 1985
Stainless steel
7163 x 3543 mm Edition of 3
Engraved on base Rickey 1/3, 1985
International Art Collection, Auckland Art Gallery
Gifted by the Edmiston Trust

"I am happy that you select "Double L Gyratory" as the appropriate sculpture for your site. I heartily approve. I have studied the drawings that you sent and feel that it is appropriate in size and will harmonize with the surroundings." July 5, 1984.

From a letter to the then Director of the Auckland Art Gallery, Dr Rodney Wilson from George Rickey.

"The visible movement is the design", George Rickey said of his kinetic pieces. The source of this effortless movement is sensed but not seen, as the perfectly balanced L-shaped vanes move lazily, in response to the slightest breeze, or dive and whirl with stronger gusts. It reflects the mood of a particular day as the austere geometric shapes, with their randomly patterned reflective surfaces, describe perfect arcs and planes in space and, when the wind dies, return to the symmetry and equilibrium of the vanes' vertical stations.

Kinetic sculptors need to understand not only the aesthetics of the forms that they use but also the physical and engineering principles that will allow that extra component, movement, to occur in predetermined ways. Here there is an interesting tension set up between the sense of freedom, implied by the movement, and the fact that the elements are invisibly restrained from ever coming into contact with each other. This elegant work is set amongst trees in the Gallery's sculpture court and its purchase coincided with the 1985 exhibition Chance and Change: a century of the avant-garde. "I think that randomness is a component of nature, and this is one way in which nature is introduced into art, not as something to imitate, but as a kind of component . . . it gives it a very special kind of life".

Reference: The Guide, 2001, published by the Auckland Art Gallery.

GEORGE RICKEY made movement a central interest in his sculpture. He was born June 6, 1907, in South Bend, Indiana. In 1913 his family moved to Scotland where his father was an engineer for the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Rickey studied modern history at Oxford, and took courses in painting and drawing at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. After graduation, he went to Paris to study art at the Académie Lhote and at the Académie Moderne, and was taught by Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant.

After teaching history briefly in Massachusetts, Rickey devoted himself to painting full time. He had his first solo exhibition at the Caz-Delbo Gallery in New York in 1933. A year later he moved to New York and set up a studio. His early paintings reflected the influences of Cézanne and Social Realism. During the late 30's, Rickey taught art at several schools.

In World War II he served in the Army Air Corps and was assigned to work with engineers in a machine shop to improve aircraft weaponry. After the war, he resumed his teaching career. A year studying Bauhaus teaching methods at the Chicago Institute of Design in the late 1940's was decisive, for it was there that he began to consider the idea of bringing together geometric form and movement.

In 1949, while working as an associate professor at Indiana University, he made his first kinetic sculpture. His early works were tall stainless-steel sculptures with arms attached to central posts, rotating on precision bearings and delicately balanced so that slight breezes would cause them to make graceful arcs. Their geometric forms and machine like engineering harked back to Russian Constructivism of the early-20th-century. Rickey's published his own book on the subject ''Constructivism: Origins and Evolution,'' in 1967.

In 1960 he moved to East Chatham, N.Y., which remained his home base until the end of his life. After five years teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. he retired in 1966 but continued to make sculpture. He died aged 95 in 2002.

His work is featured in major public and private collections throughout the world.

Reference: New York Times. July 21, 2002 "George Rickey, Sculptor Whose Works Moved, Dies at 95" by Ken Johnson.