Art: Steel-Age Sculptor

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Forms in motion demonstrate the depths of space, and dramatize it in myriad ways. For example, a galloping horse imparts one kind of life to the loop of a mile-long track, and a man making the same circuit in a wheelchair gives it quite another. Even a static sculptured figure can dramatize space somewhat, as by seeming to point or to run. But can sculpture ever convey the sense of rapid, elaborate motion through space that almost every child of the steel age daily experiences? "Yes," says Norbert Kricke of Duesseldorf, and his does.

Tubes for Speed. An unassuming man in most other ways, Kricke has pushed to the forefront of modern German sculpture. At 37, he gets up to $25,000 each for his constructions, but still lives the life of a poor art student. Kricke occupies a spectacularly shabby studio in a kind of artists' barracks in Duesseldorf, sleeping on the balcony with his wife. Their daughter, 11, has a small room to herself down the hall. The studio proper is littered with contorted steel tubes, cutting, bending and welding equipment, and an acetylene torch with its hoses and tanks.

Kricke's method is to sculpt with lines, which are his tubes. As he composes them, the tubes do not seem to outline shapes; they remain lines, as in handwriting or neon. "Never, never," Kricke vows, "will I use lines as a limiting element!" The eye follows Kricke's lines as if they were intertwining jets of water, now fast, now slow, and changing with each new viewpoint, or starting place. The effect on the viewer can be as exhilarating as that of negotiating a parkway cloverleaf at maximum speed, or of flashing through a night-blazing city in a darkened Pullman berth.

Factories for Atmosphere. The man behind these vibrant creations is surprisingly round, of belly, of face and of pale blue eye. Raised in Berlin, he entered the air force right after high school, but was grounded in a comparatively safe post because his two older brothers had already been killed. As a student at Berlin's Academy of Fine Arts after the war, he was a disciple of Rodin, but Kricke's independence of mind soon asserted itself to make him unpopular with his academic teachers. He moved to Duesseldorf because ''it has a certain dynamism, factories going up every day," and began the independent career that led him to decisively abstract sculpture. Kricke's steel constructions have since made him an international figure, with works in German, French, Belgian, English and American museums. Four of his pieces stole the show at an exhibition of European sculptors at Manhattan's Staempfli Gallery last week.

Kricke's present passion is for water forms. He will collaborate with Architect Walter Gropius on fountain designs for the University of Baghdad. "A fountain," says Kricke, "is often nothing but a Neptune ringed by spitting fish. The real thing should not be a mere mass from which water spurts. It is water, the passive element, endowed with activity. It is water, the silent element, endowed with a voice. It is water, the shapeless element, endowed with a form of its own."