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Two Lines Oblique Down Variation Two
stainless steel, 1969-1970
300 x 540 inches
Museum purchase, 1969.4

artist info

George Rickey is both an accomplished sculptor and a noted art historian. Although he began his career as a painter, he has been making kinetic sculptures since about 1951, and his classic book Constructivism Origins and Evolutions originally published in 1967, is still a leading source on the topic. It is not surprising that Rickey would be drawn to Constructivism, which is both an early twentieth-century movement associated with the work of Russians Naum Gabo and Vladimir Tatlin and an aesthetic of making art. Constructivist ideals calls for a nonobjective art made from geometric forms that are constructed rather than being shaped by expressive means.

One of the main goals of the Constructivists, and certainly of Rickey, is to make work that both occupies space and defines it through movement. These two works, Two Lines Oblique – Twenty-Five Feet and Column I are classic examples of Rickey's sculpture: elegant tapered needles of forged steel, counterbalanced so that they move slowly and rhythmically in a trajectory that responds to the natural currents of the air. Clearly, to look at one sculpture is to see two works, one at rest and the other as it moves through space and time, creating what Rickey has described on numerous occasions as "drawings in space".

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