Bridget Louise Riley (born 24 April 1931) is an English painter known for her op art paintings. She lives and works in London, Cornwall and the Vaucluse in France.Bridget Riley: Reconnaissance, September 21, 2000 – June 17, 2001 Dia Art Foundation, New York.
Early life and education Riley was born on 24 April 1931 in Norwood, London. Her father, John Fisher Riley, originally from Yorkshire, had been an Army officer. He was a printer by trade and owned his own business. In 1938, he relocated the printing business, together with his family, to Lincolnshire.
At the beginning of World War II, her father, a member of the Territorial Army, was mobilised, and Riley, together with her mother and sister Sally, moved to a cottage in Cornwall.Mary Blume (19 June 2008), Bridget Riley retrospective opens in Paris The New York Times. They shared the cottage with an aunt who had studied at Goldsmiths' College, London and Riley attended talks given by a range of retired teachers and non-professionals.. She attended Cheltenham Ladies' College (1946–1948) and then studied art at Goldsmiths' College (1949–52), and later at the Royal College of Art (1952–55).Chilvers, Ian & Glaves-Smith, John eds., Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. pp. 598–599
Between 1956 and 1959, she nursed her father, who had been involved in a serious car crash. She suffered a breakdown due to the deterioration of her father's health. After this she worked in a glassware shop. She eventually joined the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, as an illustrator, where she worked part-time until 1962. The Whitechapel Gallery exhibition of Jackson Pollock in the winter of 1958 had an impact on her.
Her early work was figurative and semi-impressionist. Between 1958 and 1959, her work at the advertising agency showed her adoption of a style of painting based on the pointillist technique.Bridget Riley Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In 1959, Riley met the painter and art educator Maurice de Sausmarez at a residential summer school that he ran with Harry Thubron and Diane Thubron. He became her friend and mentor, inspiring her to look closer at Futurism and Divisionism and artists such as Klee and Seurat. Riley and de Sausmarez began an intense romantic relationship later that year and spent the summer of 1960 together painting in Italy where they visited the Venice Biennale which was hosting a large exhibition of Futurist art. Riley painted Pink landscape (1960), a pointillist study of the landscape near Radicofani during this holiday. When the relationship ended in autumn of the same year, Riley suffered a personal and artistic crisis, creating paintings that would lead to black and white Op Art works, such as Kiss (1961). She began to develop her signature Op Art style consisting of black and white geometric patterns that explore the dynamism of sight and produce a disorienting effect on the eye and produces movement and colour. Riley and de Sausmarez maintained a professional friendship until his death in 1969. Riley has often cited his role as an early mentor and de Sausmarez's monograph on Riley and her work was published after his death in 1970.
Early in her career, Riley worked as an art teacher for children from 1957 to 1958 at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Harrow (now known as Sacred Heart Language College). At the Convent of the Sacred Heart, she began a basic design course. Later she worked at the Loughborough School of Art (1959), Hornsey College of Art, and Croydon College of Art (1962–64).
In 1961, she and her partner Peter Sedgley visited the Vaucluse plateau in the South of France, and acquired a derelict farm which they eventually transformed into a studio. Back in London, in the spring of 1962, Victor Musgrave of Gallery One held her first solo exhibition.
In 1968, Riley, with Sedgley and the journalist Peter Townsend, created the artists' organisation SPACE (Space Provision Artistic Cultural and Educational), with the goal of providing artists large and affordable studio space.
Seurat's way of seeing
Riley's mature style, developed during the 1960s, was influenced by sources like the French Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat. In 2015–6, the Courtauld Gallery, in its exhibition Bridget Riley: Learning from Seurat, made the case for how Seurat's pointillism influenced her towards abstract painting. As a young artist in 1959, Riley saw The Bridge at Courbevoie, owned by the Courtauld, and decided to paint a copy. The resulting work has hung in Riley's studio ever since, barring its loan to the gallery for the exhibition, demonstrating in the opinion of the art critic Jonathan Jones "how crucial" Seurat was to her approach to art. Riley described her copy of Seurat's painting as a "tool", interpreted by Jones as meaning that she, like Seurat, practised art "as an optical science"; in his view, Riley "really did forge her optical style by studying Seurat", making the exhibition a real meeting of old and new. Jones comments that Riley investigated Seurat's pointillism by painting from a book illustration of Seurat's Bridge at an expanded scale to work out how his technique made use of complementary colours, and went on to create pointillist landscapes of her own, such as Pink Landscape (1960), painted soon after her Seurat study and portraying the "sun-filled hills of Tuscany" (and shown in the exhibition poster) which Jones writes could readily be taken for a post-impressionist original. In his view, Riley shares Seurat's "joy for life", a simple but radical delight in colour and seeing.
Work
It was during this period that Riley began to paint the black and white works for which she first became known. They present a great variety of geometric forms that produce sensations of movement or colour. In the early 1960s, her works were said to induce a variety of sensations in viewers, from seasickness to the feeling of sky diving. From 1961 to 1965, she worked with the contrast of black and white, occasionally introducing tonal scales of grey. Works in this style comprised her first 1962 solo show at Musgrave's Gallery One, as well as numerous subsequent shows. For example, in Fall, a single perpendiculars curve is repeated to create a field of varying optical frequencies.Bridget Riley, Fall (1963) Tate. Visually, these works relate to many concerns of the period: a perceived need for audience participation (this relates them to the Happenings, which were common in this era), challenges to the notion of the mind-body duality which led Aldous Huxley to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs;Huxley, Aldous (1954) The Doors of Perception, Chatto and Windus, p. 15 concerns with a tension between a scientific future which might be very beneficial or might lead to a nuclear war; and fears about the loss of genuine individual experience in a Brave New World.Introduction to Frances Follin, Embodied Visions: Bridget Riley, Op Art and the Sixties, Thames and Hudson 2004 Her paintings since 1961, have been executed by assistants. She meticulously plans her composition's design with preparatory drawings and collage techniques; her assistants paint the final canvases with great precision under her instruction.Practising Abstraction, Bridget Riley talking to Michael Craig-Martin in Bridget Riley, Dialogues on Art, p. 62
Riley began investigating colour in 1967, the year in which she produced her first stripe painting. Following a major retrospective in the early 1970s, Riley began travelling extensively. After a trip to Egypt in the early 1980s, where she was inspired by colourful hieroglyphic decoration, Riley began to explore colour and contrast.Things to Enjoy, Bridget Riley, talking to Bryan Robertson in Bridget Riley, Dialogues on Art, p. 87 In some works, lines of colour are used to create a shimmering effect, while in others the canvas is filled with tessellating patterns. Typical of these later colourful works is Shadow Play.
Some works are titled after particular dates, others after specific locations (for instance, Les Bassacs, the village near Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt in the south of France where Riley has a studio).Karen Rosenberg (21 December 2007), Bridget Riley The New York Times.
Following a visit to Egypt in 1980–81, Riley created colours in what she called her 'Egyptian palette'Bridget Riley, Ka 3 (1980) Christie's 20th Century British Art, London, 6 June 2008. and produced works such as the Ka and Ra series, which capture the spirit of the country, ancient and modern, and reflect the colours of the Egyptian landscape. Invoking the sensorial memory of her travels, the paintings produced between 1980 and 1985 exhibit Riley's free reconstruction of the restricted chromatic palette discovered abroad. In 1983, for the first time in fifteen years, Riley returned to Venice to once again study the paintings that form the basis of European colourism. Towards the end of the 1980s, Riley's work underwent a dramatic change with the reintroduction of the diagonal in the form of a sequence of parallelograms used to disrupt and animate the vertical stripes that had characterized her previous paintings.Bridget Riley, August (1995) Christie's Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London, 30 June 2008. In Delos (1983), for example, blue, turquoise, and emerald hues alternate with rich yellows, reds and white.Jörg Heiser (May 2011), Bridget Riley at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Frieze.
Murals
Riley has painted temporary murals for the Tate, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the National Gallery. In 2014, the Imperial College Healthcare Charity Art Collection commissioned her to make a permanent 56-metre mural for St Mary's Hospital, London; the work was installed on the 10th floor of the hospital's Queen Elizabeth Queen Mother Wing, joining two others she had painted more than 20 years earlier.Caroline Davies (6 April 2014), Bridget Riley's bold colours boost London hospital ward The Guardian. Between 2017 and 2019 Riley completed a large wall painting for the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. This was the largest work she had yet undertaken, covering six of the building's eight walls. The mural referenced her Bolt of Colour of 1983, for the Royal Liverpool University Hospital and made use of a similar palette of Egyptian colours.
On the nature and role of the artist Riley made the following comments regarding artistic work in her lecture Painting Now, 23rd William Townsend Memorial Lecture, Slade School of Fine Art, London, 26 November 1996:
Writer and curator Riley has written on artists from Nicolas Poussin to Bruce Nauman. She co-curated Piet Mondrian: From Nature to Abstraction (with Sean Rainbird) at the Tate Gallery in 1996.Bridget Riley The Stripe Paintings 1961–2014, June 13 – July 25, 2014 David Zwirner, London. Alongside art historian Robert Kudielka, Riley also served as curator of the 2002 exhibition "Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation", an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2002.Alan Riding (10 March 2002), The Other Klee, the One Who's Not on Postcards The New York Times. In 2010, she curated an artists choice show at the National Gallery in London, choosing large figure paintings by Titian, Veronese, El Greco, Rubens, Poussin, and Paul Cézanne.Hilary Spurling (27 November 2010), Bridget Riley at the National Gallery – review The Guardian.Martin Gayford (10 December 2010), Colors Shimmer as Bridget Riley Confronts Old Masters: Review Bloomberg.
Exhibitions