Passing By
Signed Print

In the late 1990s, Riley began working on a series of paintings in which curved blocks of colour were positioned using an underlying grid of verticals and diagonals that moved in parallel across the surface. Of this form, Riley has said it is “wonderfully fluid, supple and strong, it can twist and bend, flow and sway, sometimes with the diagonal, sometimes against, so that the tempo is either accelerated or held back, delayed”.

Passing By, despite being non-representational in its degree of abstraction, is reminiscent of Riley’s childhood experiences of growing up in the natural beauty of the Cornish countryside. Additionally, with an interest in colour and shape, Riley adopted the curved form to permit this. Through using basic geometry to explore visual relationships between figure and ground, Riley planned extensively with scaled drawings and paper models in the lead up to the execution of the final work.