George Rickey

Two Lines excentric jointed with six angles, 1987

George Rickey is a key figure of kinetic art that came into being in the 1950s and 1960s. Transforming the potential energy of traditional sculpture into real movement was one of the basic ideas of that artistic direction. Unlike its early pioneers Rickey is less interested in the aesthetic composition of various formal elements in the sense of a painting moving out into the space than in illustrating movement itself. With this aim in mind, Rickey reduces the material carriers of movement to elemental geometrical forms that have no value as such in terms of content or aesthetics. In the 1987 work Two lines eccentric jointed with six angles these are simple linear elements that are linked by joints at two eccentric points. This means that seen in terms of gravity alone they represent a skillfully contrived condition of extremely delicate balance. The slightest breath of wind triggers them to swing like a pendulum, and when this is happening, the changed delineation of space also transforms the ideas of area and volume that the lines describe in the imagination.