Bridget
Riley

Working exclusively in monochrome until the late 1960s, Riley’s early works integrate optical, scientific effects into the language of painting. Typically featuring repeated geometric shapes, Riley created the effect of movement on two-dimensional surfaces, stimulating the viewer’s eyes into sharper attention as the canvases appear to move and oscillate. Riley’s first works demonstrate her desire to capture the dazzling brilliance of nature in non-figurative abstraction: rendering the sensations and emotions generated when regarding nature in paint, rather than the natural landscapes themselves.

Throughout the 1960s, Riley developed her practice by incorporating grey hues into her works. Yet, it was these exclusively black and white works which initially propelled Riley to international acclaim following the artist’s inaugural solo show at Gallery One in 1962.

Following Riley’s precipitous rise to fame in the 1960s, her zingy geometric designs were quickly appropriated by the fashion industry. Concerned this would damage her artistic reputation, Riley was perturbed. However, as the artist continued to formally innovate and expand the bounds of her painting, her reputation never suffered.

Deceptively simple from the beginning, Riley’s jazzy, psychedelic work is instantly recognisable and continues to define contemporary British art.

The Stripes series is Riley’s most iconic beginning in 1971. Introducing colour into her work in 1967, Riley expanded the perceptual and optical possibilities of her compositions. Despite being a relatively constrained art form: repeated stripes of plain colour, Riley’s successive horizontal bars provide a disruptive surge of visual information. These works represent Riley’s philosophy: that complexity lurks beneath the surface of simplicity, if only we take the time to notice.

The stability of the repeated stripe form enabled Riley to explore the visual effects of colour and varying colour combinations in greater depth. Distinctive and optically vibrant, the works comprising the Stripes series are instantly recognisable.

Riley credits her fervent interest in colour and form with the work of the Italian Futurists and French Masters such as Henri Matisse and Georges Seurat. Pointillism and Divisionism also underpin Riley’s practice: both modern art movements that rely on the capacity of the eye to regard colours laid side by side in order to achieve a fuller spectrum of colour. Like many artists before Riley, including Sonia Delaunay and Josef Albers, Riley was keen to explore the emotional reactions colours could evoke in the viewer.

On Seurat’s work Riley confessed: 'his work gave me a sense of the viewer’s importance as an active participant. Perception became the medium'. This reflects Riley’s utopian view of the function of art: the viewer completes the experience of painting by regarding the artwork.

Despite being regarded as a pioneer of Op Art, Riley regards her painting as less about creating optical illusions, from which the term lends its name, but more about stimulating the viewer’s imagination. Riley’s style has developed in stages throughout her career, from monochromatic, simplified geometric shapes to more colourful, complex rhomboids. Yet, her commitment to exploring the potentialities of colour, shape and form have remained constant throughout.

A painter and screen printer, Riley’s works are the result of lengthy sketching and meticulous planning, enacted with mathematical precision.

In 1965, Riley was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition The Responsive Eye in New York; the exhibition that first drew world-wide attention to her work. In 1968, Riley represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale and was the first woman to receive the International Painting Prize.

In 1998, Riley became one of only 65 Companions of Honor in Britain. In 2019 the Hayward Gallery opened a 70-year retrospective of Riley’s life and oeuvre. Now at the age of 90, Riley continues to inspire younger generations of artists from Damien Hirst to Rachel Whiteread.

In 2006, Untitled (Diagonal Curve) (1966) a black and white canvas of dizzying curves, sold at Sotheby’s for US$2.1 million, nearly three times its US$730,000 high estimate, becoming a new record for the artist. In 2008, Chant 2 (1967), which won Riley the 1968 Venice Biennale prize, sold for £2,561,250 at Sotheby’s.

As an iconic British artist, Riley’s works sell well on the primary and secondary markets.