Maruani Mercier has opened a second Brussels space at Rue Saint-Georges 13, adding a new address in the heart of Ixelles’ gallery district to its longstanding base on Avenue Louise—and its coastal outpost in Knokke.
The new space lands with intent. Not just more walls, but a recalibration of programme: a place to extend, test, and sharpen what the gallery already does well in Brussels. The opening reads as both continuation and pivot—an architectural expansion that folds directly into curatorial ambition.
To mark the moment, the gallery turns to George Rickey, whose sculptures move with a precision that feels almost improbable—delicate, balanced, and quietly responsive to the slightest shifts in air. Titled Ordered Movement, the inaugural exhibition spans four decades of Rickey’s practice, from 1957 to 1997, focusing on smaller-scale works that distil his exploration of motion into its most refined form.
Rickey’s titles often nod to the natural world—Trastevere Flower, Wild Carrot II, Meander—but the works themselves resist representation. Instead, they operate on the same underlying principles: gravity, balance, airflow, time. Stainless steel elements pivot and oscillate, tracing arcs that are never quite repeated, their movement shaped by invisible forces rather than fixed intention.
There’s a clarity to the construction—lines, squares, spirals—but what unfolds is anything but static. The sculptures extend into time, asking to be watched rather than simply seen. In pieces like Two Lines Temporal, motion slows, reverses, pauses; the work begins to echo the logic of a clock, only to subtly undo it. Duration becomes elastic. Attention stretches.
Rickey described his practice as a study in “ordered movement,” and that phrase holds the show together. These are not gestures or performances but systems—finely tuned structures that reveal how motion behaves when given just enough freedom. Light catches on the brushed steel surfaces, never fully reflecting, instead marking the passage of movement itself.
The choice feels pointed. To open a new space with work that is so attuned to environment, to micro-variation, to the choreography of space and time, is to underline what a gallery can be: not just a container, but an active field.
George Rickey: Ordered Movement, April 22nd – June 6th, 2026, Maruani Mercier, Rue Saint-Georges
Public opening: April 22nd, 4PM–9PM
About the artist
Originally trained as a painter and historian, American sculptor George Rickey (1907–2002) developed an interest in mechanics in his forties while studying aircraft during WWII. Driven by childhood memories of a yacht’s compass and his grandfather’s clock shop, he dedicated over five decades to the creation of numerous kinetic sculptures. Rickey’s art is in the permanent collections of over 150 museums worldwide, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Hakone Open-Air Museum.
