ART CITIES:London-Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley’s paintings came to International notice when she exhibited along with Victor Vasarely and others in the Museum of Modern Art in New York at an exhibition called “The Responsive Eye” in 1965. It was one of Riley’s paintings, that was featured on the cover to the exhibition catalogue.The exhibition was enormously popular with the general public, though less so with the critics.

 By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

Critics dismissed op art as portraying nothing more than trompe l’oeil, or tricks that fool the eye. Regardless, op art’s popularity with the public increased, and op art images were used in a number of commercial contexts. Despite the critics, Riley held another wildly popular exhibition at this time in the US, at the Richard Feigen Gallery in New York. Tickets sold out on the first day that they went on sale, a remarkable achievement for an artist who was still in her early thirties. For her solo exhibition “Studies: 1984–1997”, Bridget Riley has selected a group of works from the 1980s and 1990s that reflect the connection between the writings of Paul Klee and her own understanding of abstract painting. As Riley has noted, “Paul Klee was of seminal importance to me because he showed me what abstraction meant”.  The mid- 1980s saw Bridget Riley’s work move progressively away from a build up of sensation giving rise to a perceptual response, and instead towards an art of pure visual sensation, treating form and colour as ‘ultimate identities’, as things in themselves. Units of color were arranged according to principles of relation and chromatic interaction, but increasingly were connected to the implication of rhythm, space and depth. Riley began to incorporate diagonal ‘lozenge’ elements rising from left to right which cut across the verticals, shattering the picture plane. Planes of color alternately advance and recede, giving rise to contrasts in color, tone, density and direction. On view in the exhibition are working studies that show the movement from “stripes” to “rhomboids”. In the earliest of these works, Riley begins to cross her stripes with short diagonal elements, to move the eye around, across, and through the pictorial space, leading to the development of a new visual form, her ‘rhomboid’ paintings. In 2002, Bridget Riley co-curated “Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation” at the Hayward Gallery, London, with Robert Kudielka. As Riley wrote in the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition, “Klee is unique in that he demonstrated more fully [than his contemporaries] that the elements of painting are not just a means to an end, but have distinct characteristics of their own…. A colour in a painting is no longer the colour of something but a hue and a tone either contrasting with other hues and tones or related in shade and gradations. And, very importantly, forms do not act as substitutes for bodies in physical space but are spatial agents in the picture plane”. The rhomboid paintings, for which these studies were prepared, constituted a new learning phase for Riley. When they were first exhibited, some thought that the rhomboids were painterly strokes, enlarged and formalised, deriving once again from Georges Seurat, and there was a certain truth in this observation. The integration of these forms was a very conscious effort by the artist to rediscover pictorial craftsmanship and to increase the means at her disposal. Seen together, these works embody Riley’s powers of invention and even reinvention, and her ongoing engagement with the understanding of abstract painting.

In accordance with city guidelines, a limited number of visitors will be allowed within the exhibition spaces. To schedule your visit, please click here.

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 24 Grafton Street, London, Duration: 15/6/20- , Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 11:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com