(South Ben/Indiana 1907–2002 East Chatam/New York)
One Fixed One Moving Line Diagonal VI, signed, dated Rickey 1988, stainless steel, unique piece, height 100 cm, moving line 96 cm, diagonal line 89 cm, on stainless steel base 17.7 x 6.2 x 2.5 cm (total height 102.5 cm)

We are grateful to the George Rickey Foundation / The Estate of George Rickey for its kind assistance with cataloguing this work.

Provenance:
Thomas Segal Gallery, Boston MA - there acquired by the present owner in 1992
Private Collection, Germany

George Warren Rickey’s sculptures are not an invitation to action for the viewer, but rather an inducement to meditative contemplation, which consists of the viewer fully engaging with the movement and the coming about of movement. “One cannot really end this contemplation, one can only abandon it,” as Max Imdahl put it.
Rickey’s stylistic idiom is founded upon constructivism: “one has to recognize the connection between the more rigid design and the greater versatility of movement, since the simpler the shapes, the more their movement, or to quote Rickey himself, their ‘choreography’, becomes key for the contemplation of the art work (...).”
“As the artist himself put it: ‘I like the movement to be slow, so that one has to wait for its emergence and marvel at its slowness.’ It is precisely the slow movement that catches the attention of the viewer, already posing the question whether movement takes place at all; it is precisely this that sensitises the viewer’s experience of movement and attunes him to movement. And it is precisely the slow movement which can prompt the viewer to sink into observation, as if into a state of contemplative self-forgetfulness.”
In this manner, the viewer may not only immerse him or herself in the movement, but also in the shadows cast on the wall, which are mirrored by these dances of the swinging arm.

Max Imdahl, George Warren Rickey in: Erläuterungen zur Modernen Kunst, 60 Texte von Max Imdahl, seinen Freunden und Schülern,
ed. by Norbert Kunisch, Bochum 1990, pp. 217-220, here p. 217/21