Bridget Riley: Biography & Artwork

Bridget
Riley

British artist Bridget Riley’s international success took off in the early 60s when she began pioneering the abstract paintings she is known for today. Leading the British Abstract Op-Art movement, Riley plays with visual perception using psychedelic geometry and colour, as begun in her 1961 work Movement in Squares.

Biography

Op Art luminary Bridget Riley plays with optical and chromatic phenomena and is a central figure in modern and abstract art. Imploring the viewer to consider how it physically feels to look, Riley constructs geometric patterns which cause perceptual disruption.

Born in Norwood, London, in 1931, Riley's early biography sees her spend most of her childhood in Cornwall and Lincolnshire, going on to study at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. Initially painting figurative subjects in a semi-Impressionist manner, everything about Riley’s style evolved in the 1960s when she developed the iconic style she is known for today and began to dominate the Abstract Op Art scene in Britain. Op Art explored the dynamic potentialities of optical phenomena and created works that produced a disorientating, dizzying effect on the eye – an effect that has become emblematic of a Riley artwork. Deceptively simple from the beginning, Riley’s jazzy, psychedelic work continues to define contemporary British art.

Riley’s career and success took off at the start of the 1960s. The game changer, as she admits, was her 1961 Movement in Squares. This painting was a ground-breaking moment for the artist, as it marked the start of her journey towards the geometric patterns that define her oeuvre. With its endless dizzying and mesmerising effects, her Movement in Squares set the tone for her future masterpieces.

A second watershed in her career, in 1967 her Stripes series officially introduced colour to Riley’s previously monochromatic black and white works. The stability of the repeated stripe form enabled Riley to explore the visual effects of colour and varying colour combinations in greater depth, expanding her compositions' perceptual and optical possibilities. Distinctive and optically vibrant, the Stripes series is truly iconic.

Following Riley’s precipitous rise to fame, the fashion industry quickly appropriated her zingy geometric designs. Concerned this would damage her artistic reputation, Riley was perturbed. However, as the artist continued to innovate and expand the bounds of her painting formally, her reputation never suffered. Riley progressed to having her first major solo exhibition in 1971 at the Hayward Gallery. Featuring one of her earliest works, the gallery continues to foster a relationship with Riley, presenting the 2019-20 Bridget Riley exhibition nearly five decades later. The National Galleries of Scotland also exhibited Riley’s artworks from June until September 2019, displaying over 70 years’ worth of paintings that defined British art.

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.
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.
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.

A stand-out example of British artist Bridget Riley’s visually arresting illusionist œuvre, Untitled (Diagonal Curve) (1966) smashed its price estimate (between £2.5 million and £3.5 million), realising £4,338,500 at Christie’s London in June of 2016. Performing markedly stronger than some of its straight-lined counterparts, such as Zing 2 (1971), which realised just under £3.3 million in June 2021, this dynamic, monochrome work reminds us of Riley’s position at the centre point of the Op Art movement.

Comprising a vertigo-inducing assemblage of seemingly oscillatory form, this optically challenging piece is one of the artist’s last experimentations with black and white; the next year, Riley would go on to make her first bold steps in the world of colour.