Rick Oginz

Who is Rick Oginz?

Rick Oginz is an American visual artist born in Philadelphia. Oginz started making sculpture at 16, working parallel to his traditional high school at the Corkorin Institute, then moved on to Tyler College of Art and Design at Temple University, working as the ceramics assistant to Professor Rudolph Staffel. Continuing at the University of Wisconsin, he studied with British sculptor, Hubert Dalwood. Graduating in 1968 with an MFA, Oginz was offered the opportunity by Dalwood to teach part-time at Hornsey College of Art and Design in London.

During this time his work focused on the contemporary minimalist school, using steel and wood in precise ways, trying to achieve an industrial aesthetic. Oginz's pieces were installations that depicted a continuity of space and scale without the ridgity of the edge, or boundary. In an exhibition at Serpentine Gallery, in Hyde Park, a rectangular shape was described by its content of random vectors ending at the imaginary plane of the rectangle. This piece was a few feet high inside the gallery and got progressively larger as it moved through a glass wall and continued out into Hyde Park, where it ended at a 10 foot height. Though it embraced the minimalist aesthetic, Oginz's inspiration came from notions of quantum physics—that vectors made of wood were describing the scale and shape, as opposed to its contours. This piece is an example of a turning point in Oginz's artistic practice—a shift from minimalism to a focus on the philosophy of science.