(South Ben/Indiana 1907–2002 East Chatam/New York)
Two open Triangles Up IV, 1983, signed, dated on the base Rickey 1983 (incised), no 1 from the edition of 3, stainless steel, 133 x 118 x 18.3 cm

Letter of confirmation:
Philip Rickey, George Rickey Estate, St. Paul USA, 7.10.2019

Provenance:
Zabriskie Gallery, New York - there acquired by the
previous owner in 1983

Exhibited:
Landhaus Galleries, Kinderhook, New York, A spring Art Event to benefit the Columbia County Council of the Arts, June 1983

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.
George Warren 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 triangles
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. 217/218