BRIDGET RILEY
Bridget Riley (born 1931) is one of Britain’s most celebrated artists, and her career has been distinguished by a series of remarkable innovations. Her central, abiding concern is the act of seeing, though unlike any of her contemporaries the entire scope of her work is dedicated to this idea, in a way that resembles the musical principle of variations on a theme. Since 1961, when she first attracted critical attention with her dazzling black-and-white paintings, Riley’s subject matter has been restricted to a simple vocabulary of abstract shapes – squares, circles, ovals, lines, stripes and curves – disposed in increasingly complex and subtle arrangements.
It might seem surprising that the source of Riley’s engagement with visual experience is nature, yet the vivid memories of the effects of light and weather on the Cornish landscape observed during her childhood generated in her a joy and wonder in the act of seeing. It is this creation of visual pleasure – by using such natural phenomena as a metaphorical, not literal, starting point – that is her purpose. A similar cause of inspiration was the work of Giacomo Balla, which provoked in Riley the realisation that sensations of movement and light were most effectively evoked not by illustration but by equivalent pictorial means.
Through unexpected relationships between lines, colours and spaces, Riley creates an arresting range of visual sensations, such as an impression of light or quivering movement. She realised that working with pictorial elements that are entirely unstable had enormous visual and expressive potential and sought to exploit the instability of colour and light and the tendency of colours to be affected by their context. The struggle between the mind and the eye to comprehend what one sees produces various contradictory impressions resulting in a range of optical phenomena, which Riley sets in motion between the painting and the viewer.