The estate of sculptor George Rickey will now be represented by Kasmin.
George Rickey installs Study for Crucifera IV at the Guggenheim Museum, September 1979. Photograph by Achim Pahle. © George Rickey Foundation, Inc.
The estate of the late sculptor George Rickey will now be represented worldwide by Kasmin gallery, which will present two concurrent exhibitions of Rickey’s iconic works next fall. The first will be an offsite installation of nine monumental kinetic sculptures on New York’s Park Avenue as part of the city’s ongoing Art in the Parks program, while the second will be a cluster of three large-scale works presented at the Kasmin Sculpture Garden at 28th Street next to the High Line, which together make for the largest exhibition of Rickey’s work since a Guggenheim retrospective in 1979.
Eric Gleason, senior director at Kasmin, said in a statement:
George Rickey is a singular entity in the history of 20th-century sculpture, and his numerous innovations within the realm of kinetics helped to create and define a genre. Kasmin has a well-documented commitment to placing monumental sculpture in the public realm, and the gallery is thrilled to expand that programming to include Rickey's work.
Rickey, who died in 2002, was best known for his kinetic sculptures, which were defined by a precise, mechanistic interaction of forms influenced by both industrial machinery and the movement of the natural world. The artist drew inspiration from sources ranging from gyroscopes and gunsights to patterns of wind and fog. His work is in the collections of a number of institutions, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and many others.
According to Artsy data, demand for Rickey’s work reached a new plateau in 2017 after the number of inquiries on his work on the platform nearly doubled from 2016 following a succession of exhibitions with Marlborough. Since then, demand for his work has remained relatively consistent save for a 52 percent spike in inquiries last year.
Describing his own practice, Rickey once wrote:
The artist finds waiting for him, as subject, not the trees, not the flowers, not the landscape, but the waving of branches and the trembling of stems, the piling up or scudding of clouds, the rising and setting, and waxing and waning of heavenly bodies.
