A major work by one of the 20th century’s most celebrated kinetic sculptors will be on public display at Penn State’s University Park campus beginning Tuesday.
‘Breaking Column III,’ a monumental stainless-steel sculpture completed by American sculptor George Rickey in 2001, is being installed on the Palmer Museum of Art’s Curtin Road plaza. The piece is on loan from a private collection and the installation will be on view for the next year.
Palmer Director Erin Coe led the effort to bring the sculpture to Penn State.
“We are honored to present a major work by one of the most inventive and influential artists of the last century,” Coe said in a news release. “’Breaking Column III’ combines the laws of physics and the aesthetics of abstraction resulting in a sculpture that is never static, but poised somewhere between motion and stillness.”
Rickey, who died in 2002, made his first mobile during his service in World War II and turned his attention to kinetic sculpture full-time in the late 1940s. His stainless steel sculptures are comprised of shapes ‘engineered to respond to air currents and gravitational pull with deliberate, graceful, and unpredictable movements,’ according to a news release.
More than 25-feet tall, ‘Breaking Column III’ is one of Rickey’s most important and complex works, according to the Palmer. The sculpture ‘playfully disrupts the stasis and calm demeanor of a classic architectural form, allowing its discrete components to shift and move in response to natural forces.’
The Palmer, College of Arts and Architecture and architects, engineers and planners from the Office of Physical Plant worked together with representatives of the George Rickey Estate to organize the placement and installation of the sculpture on the Palmer plaza.
Philip Rickey, son of the artist and manager of the George Rickey Estate, is overseeing the installation. His grandfather James Leighton earned a civil engineering degree from Penn State and after World War I worked in Pittsburgh designing and building bridges.
“Since Penn State is the premier land grant university in Pennsylvania, with its dedication to the sciences and engineering, as well as the liberal and fine arts, I am sure that my father’s sculpture will bring much delight and quizzical looks when students, faculty, staff and visitors take some time to stand and watch the drama of ‘Breaking Column III’ unfold,” Philip Rickey said.
Coe said the busy area around the Palmer plaza is an ideal location to present Rickey’s major late-work.
‘With hundreds of students crisscrossing the plaza each day, the sculpture will enhance their educational and aesthetic experience at Penn State, while mimicking the ebb and flow of activity along Curtin Road,” she said.
Rickey’s sculptures are located in major museums and public spaces around the world, including the Guggenheim, the Whitney, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Scottish National Gallery and Tate Gallery.
Watch ‘Breaking Column III’ in movement outside of the Marlborough Gallery in New York
Breaking Column III 1993-2001 | George Rickey, Kinetic Sculptor from George Rickey on Vimeo.
