Davidson Gallery presents, George Rickey: A Survey, an exhibition of works by acclaimed sculptor George Rickey. This show marks the 18th solo exhibition at the gallery for George Rickey, dating back to their first collaboration in the 1970s. Rickey’s work runs the gamut from intimate and delicate to monumental. Throughout his career, George Rickey refused to be pigeonholed, constantly reimagining kinetic sculpture and always trying to define motion in ways that other artists did not. From his earliest hanging sculptures, reminiscent of Alexander Calder’s mobiles, to his first major outdoor work which is now in the collection of MoMA, Rickey constantly changed scale, material, form, and technology, but always with a throughline of motion that was his legacy.
Rickey approached his art with a constructivist mindset, he was both a collector of Constructivist material (his collection of Constructivist works is now at the Neuberger Museum) and close friends with Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo. His most well-known works – those made of brushed stainless steel forms – epitomize the austerity of Constructivism, but also the forward-looking, self-aware stance that art is and must be socially integrated. Rickey’s work, cutting through space, defining motion, intimating identifiable forms while maintaining its abstraction, remains masterful and contemporary.