ART CITIES:N.York-Bridget Riley
Bridget Riley is well-known since the mid-1960s for her distinctive, optically vibrant paintings, called “Op Art”. She characterised her work to the art critic David Sylvester in 1967 as “High-voltage”. Her work explores optical phenomena and juxtaposes color either by using a chromatic technique of identifiable hues or by selecting achromatic colors. In doing so, her work appears to flicker, pulsate and move, encouraging the viewer’s visual tension.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery
Bridget Riley works meticulously, carefully mixing her colors to achieve the exact hue and intensity she desires. She explores color interaction first in small gouache color studies, then moving to full-size paper. The large-scale canvases are then marked up and painted. She is interested in visual effects, commenting: “The eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. One moment, there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events”. Her exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery feature new and older works, marking the 50 years since Riley’s participated in the exhibition “The Responsive Eye” at The Museum of Modern Art, which led to instant, international recognition for the young British painter. From the early 1960s, the artist has employed elementary shapes, such as: circles, stripes, and curves, to create visual experiences that actively engage the viewer, testing the limits of each element at various stages throughout her career. The exhibition includes paintings and works on paper spanning almost 35 years of Riley’s practice. It takes its chronological point of departure in vertical stripe works from the early 1980s featuring her “Egyptian palette”, which unlike previous combinations of color was organized according to plastic (and not rational) principles. These asymmetrical compositions anticipated the ensuing diagonal grid paintings that Riley began in 1986. Featuring rhomboid shapes that break up the picture plane, these in turn became the foundation for her curved paintings in the late 1990s. Vertical, curvilinear shapes prevailed in the past decade and also characterize her wall painting “Rajasthan”, which is for the first time on display outside of Europe. The exhibition culminates with Riley’s most recent stripe works as well as a new series of black-and-white paintings that explore concavity and convexity of the line, all shown here for the first time. The return to painting in black and white, which she had abandoned in the mid-1960s in order to explore the properties of color, was directly inspired by Riley’s 1962 painting “Tremor”, and here appears in the current context of five decades of work.
Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 525 & 533 West 19th Street, New York, Duration: 5/11-19/12/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com
