George Rickey (1907-2002) one of our most distinguished late modern, kinetic sculptors, was born in South Bend, Indiana. He went to Glasgow later, where he attended Glenalmond College. Rickey then went on to study history at Balliol College, Oxford University. During his last years of study there, from 1926 to 1929, he also took classes at the Ruskin School of Art. During the 1930s, Rickey traveled in Europe and America, teaching at the private Groton School in Massachusetts from 1930 to 1933. Eventually, he made his home in Old Chatham in upstate New York, near where his engineer lived–the man responsible for working out the balance and slow motion of the artworks  Rickey, who was as gifted a writer/art historian as he was an artist–he wrote the highly regarded volume entitled Constructivism, a near outline of that art movement. Rickey can best be described as a European artist who decided to make his career in America. His sculptures, usually planes or frames made of thin steel rods, often embellished with polished patterns made on the face of the steel, would become visible when catching the light and are exquisite examples of strong kinetic art. Their forms were made alive and became strongly attractive due to their slow movement, activated by a slight wind (at Kasmin, fans were set high up on the gallery walls). Distant breezes from ceiling fans caused the forms to sway. 

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A gimbal, or pivoted support like a gyroscope, provides Rickey’s sculptures with the means to rotate, which is key to the graceful motion of Rickey’s art; he was gifted enough to write an article on the subject for Scientific American. Because the artist was talented in engineering as well as art, he had the wherewithal to devise works that functioned as if they were run by motors rather than moving air. Motion itself, as embodied in these remarkable works, becomes a theme and a goal for Rickey And because motion is a transparent aspect of his art, linear and three-dimensional both it needs the volumetric visual weight of its forms to generate the change their motion provides.

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But the more difficult aspect of kinetic art lies in its ability to convince the viewer that its movement might be more important than the form itself. Inevitably, though, Rickey’s formal and mechanical intelligence merged; the moving form became an emblem of how an angle or plane could be visually transformed by slow movement. The point of this very good show at Kasmin lies in Rickey’s transformation of what many might have experienced as a gimmick into something much larger than that–the application of means that would turn the sculptures into something memorable for their changes of state. By staying away from color and concentrating only on the patterns a burr might impose on the sculptures’ steel surfaces, Rickey needed to find other ways of making the life of his art interesting (for many today, being “interesting” is the only true criteria of success in new art, a point first made by minimalist Donald Judd.  There are elements in Rickey’s simplicity that would give precedent to minimalist objects. Still, there is something else, too: an enduring recognition of the dynamics and beauty of geometric abstraction, made evident in the great development of constructivism, the movement Russia produced in the 1920s.

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Rickey did work mostly with geometric forms; in the Kasmin show, it is hard to remember any organic shapes. Linear construction tends to be seen as rationalism more than distant from the expansive lyricism we see in ab-ex paintings. Perhaps this is why Rickey was well-praised in Germany, but perhaps not quite as well-known as he might have been in America. His rejection of emotion only, or even mostly, as a window into the imagination, in favor of a rational but also poetic treatment of defined planes, startling in their symmetry, resulted in precision, weight, and balance. These qualities made his work both rational and poetic at the same moment. Much of Rickey’s art, even the small pieces, has a monumental quality; the sculptures also work well as embellishments for buildings–older readers will remember a work, two open, long, narrow rectangles, defined by thin strips of steel, standing before the front wall of the Guggenheim Museum. This piece’s motion, like almost all of Rickey’s art, finds a poised, motionless center by creating shapes in contexts that would stay still (as they usually do). While the former comment sounds slightly absurd, its contrary nature moves beyond a difficult idea into the startling achievement of major art.

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Kasmin’s show of wall relief draws our attention by developing motion in relatively small works against the tall, flat surface of the gallery walls. Not everything is a relief work; a number of the sculptures rise from pedestals in the open space of the exhibition The wall works go up quite high, and their movement, seen from a fair distance, begins to assume the characteristics of poetic change. How does an artist successfully use movement to characterize duration or change the implications of Suze? The works on exhibit are not public in size, but neither are they small. The lyrically beautiful work, called Seascape III Wall (1993), consists of long, narrow spear-like projections in two groups, with the two nexuses from which the poles project set a distance of equal heights, on a wall. The thin elements move up and down a few inches, seemingly entangled with one another. What results is the slow, moving elegance characteristic of all of Rickey’s work.

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One of the more interesting characteristics of Rickey’s art, its reliance on the steel alone as a naked, unpainted plane, throws the surface into some small relief by abstract patterns made by burrs set directly against the surface of the steel. The whorls, visible enough when the light hits them, give the work another dimension, a tiny bit of depth. This detail shifts, if only for a moment while the viewer looks at it, the moving parts of the sculpture toward the experience of painting. It is a minor condition but one that nicely complicates the surface of the art.

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For example, it is possible to see Four Rectangles One Square Diagonal (1979), as an outer gathering of a collection of four rectangles shaping the outer part of a gestalt best described as a larger square poised like a diamond shape. In the center, surrounded by the rectangular planes, is a small square. Some space occurs between all of the parts. It is not that these works, any of them, carry cultural meaning beyond the extension of form.  Constructivism, as a movement carrying literary or intellectual meaning, does not hold much weight. But if we allow for the masterful abstract beauty of simple shapes slowly suspended, moving in a near collision with each other, we come across an essential imaginative treatment of non–objective art.