Kasmin is pleased to present an exhibition of three monumental sculptures by George Rickey, opening on September 9, 2021 in the Kasmin Sculpture Garden in Chelsea, New York. Viewable from the High Line at 27th Street, the presentation runs concurrently with George Rickey: Monumental Sculpture on Park Avenue, a major public exhibition of the artist's work along the central median on Park Avenue between 52nd and 56th Streets. This marks the largest ever multi-site exhibition of Rickey's monumental works in the city.
All three works in the Kasmin Sculpture Garden date back to the 1960s, including Rickey’s iconic Two Red Lines (1963-1975), one of the first to feature what would become the artist’s signature vertical blades. The blades of this piece, wrote Hayden Herrera for Artforum in 1975, “intersect, scissor open and slow increasingly as they near the horizontal, as if they were summoning energy for the return voyage,” adding that the movements in all of Rickey’s works, “are complex, random and endlessly intriguing.”
Simultaneous with the rooftop installation, Kasmin will also present a curated selection of indoor Rickey sculptures located in Kasmin's gallery space within The High Line Nine at 507 West 27th Street.
ABOUT GEORGE RICKEYGeorge Rickey was among the most inventive and influential sculptors of the twentieth century. Rickey, along with Calder, introduced the notion of kinetic sculpture to America in the mid twentieth century. Rickey’s kinetic works are the outgrowth of his experiments with wire and metal that began during his service in World War II. By the late 1950s and early 1960s he had defined his sculptural forms as simple, geometric shapes such as rectangles, trapezoids, cubes, and lines. Rickey created work that specifically revealed the ever-present, but unseen, elements and forces of nature. Rickey expanded the physical vocabulary of sculpture, positioning his work at the intersection of art and nature. In his hands, art and nature are one and the same.Rickey’s work can be found in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which hosted a retrospective of the artist in 1979, and in those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Tate Gallery. His public works remain on display in towns and cities in every part of the United States, and throughout Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
