George Rickey: The First Movement: Art Basel OVR: Pioneers

“I think it’s important to make art that you have to wait for.”

—George Rickey

George Rickey
Little Machine of Unconceived Use
1953-54
stainless steel, brass, black paint

8 1/4 x 24 x 17 inches
21 x 61 x 43.2 cm
Unique

Born in 1907 in South Bend, IN, George Rickey spent over five decades committed to the creation of poetic and precisely-calibrated sculptures that he referred to as his “useless machines.” Designed to be situated in the public sphere, the works are activated by their interplay with the surrounding environment, reshaping the landscape and bringing heightened attention to aspects of light, movement, and composition. Of all the natural forces, it was the wind’s movement that most captured Rickey’s imagination. He 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.”

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