Bridget Riley
Bridget Riley is a renowned British artist, best known for her pioneering contributions to the optical art (op art) movement, which gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Born on April 24, 1931, in South London, Riley showed early artistic talent and pursued her education at prestigious institutions like Cheltenham Ladies' College, Goldsmiths' College, and the Royal College of Art. Initially focused on black-and-white figure drawing, she experienced a transformative moment in 1956 after attending an abstract expressionist exhibit, which reignited her passion for art.
Riley's work is characterized by the use of simple geometric forms and patterns, such as in her notable pieces "Kiss" and "Movement in Squares," which create an illusion of movement and engage the viewer's perception. By the late 1960s, she began incorporating color into her art, showcasing her mastery of color relationships and visual effects in works like "Cataract 3." Throughout her career, she received numerous accolades, including the International Prize for Painting in 1968, and her artistic influence extended to fashion and design during the vibrant cultural scene of the 1960s.
Riley's legacy continues through her ongoing exhibitions and the Bridget Riley Art Foundation, which aims to foster art education. Her recent retrospective at the Yale Center for British Art in 2022 highlighted her evolution from monochromatic works to colorful and dynamic compositions. Today, Riley remains a significant figure in contemporary art, living and working in London.
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Subject Terms
Bridget Riley
British artist
- Born: April 24, 1931
- Place of Birth: Norwood, South London, England
Education: Cheltenham Ladies' College; Goldsmiths' College; Royal College of Art
Significance: Bridget Riley is a pioneering artist whose black-and-white and color paintings ushered the optical art (op art) movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Background
Bridget Riley was born on April 24, 1931, in Norwood, South London, a daughter of John Fisher Riley, a printer. Her father relocated his printing business and the family to Lincolnshire in 1938, and in 1939, he was drafted into military service during World War II (1939–1945). Riley, her mother, and her sister moved to a village in Cornwall away from the fighting. At an early age, Riley had an aptitude for drawing and painting. From 1946 to 1949, she attended boarding school at Cheltenham Ladies' College and started her art studies at Goldsmiths' College in 1949. Her focus was on figure drawing, working mostly in black and white as she was not yet comfortable with color. She continued her studies at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955, but she found that the teaching contradicted the direction modern art was heading at the time, particularly as it related to French painter and sculptor Henri Matisse.
In 1955, Riley returned to Lincolnshire to take care of her ailing father. She suffered a mental breakdown as a result and took time off from art. She settled in London in 1956 following her father's recovery. That year, Riley attended an exhibit on abstract expression at the Tate Gallery that moved her back into creating art. Some of her artwork was included in group shows in London. She accepted a position at J. Walter Riley, an advertising agency, as a commercial illustrator in 1958, and she taught art classes at various colleges.
By 1960, Riley was devoting more time to her art, dabbling in pointillism (the art movement employing dots to create an image) as seen in Pink Landscape (1960). However, she began to change direction by examining basic shapes like lines and squares and finding ways to manipulate the scene.
Life's Work
Riley's paintings featuring elementary forms began in the early 1960s with Kiss(1961). The tempera-on-canvas painting featured two large black masses—a square and an oval—that appear to oscillate within a tight, white space. Movement in Squares (1961) was composed of black-and-white squares in a checkerboard pattern that shift in size to create what appears to be an off-center abyss. For this painting, Riley experimented with squares in alternate spaces and found shifts in shape. She noticed in her binary approach in her work that the light/dark contrasts created movement in the piece. Without a focal point, the eye wanders through the art. In 1962, Riley held her first solo exhibit featuring her black-and-white paintings in London.
In 1965, Riley was among seventy-five artists included in New York City's Museum of Modern Art's exhibit "The Responsive Eye." The emerging movement exhibited in the show was coined optical art, or op art, for its use of optical illusions. The show and Riley's work were popular with the public but dismissed by critics. Riley evolved into an art celebrity in Britain's swinging 1960s, with fashion and design adapting her style.
Riley brought color into her work in 1967, a feat accomplished after years of study. At first, she found that color and form could only work separately, but her work with the grays and movements inside her black-and-white paintings gave her the confidence needed to use color in her paintings. Riley also started working on a larger scale and with acrylic paint. Cataract 3 (1967) used curvy horizontal lines—some in color and some with black and white—and diagonal stripes to create visual instability. With Late Morning (1967–68), Riley employed vertical stripes in blue, red, and green with white space trapped between them. Riley relied on the interactivity of color relationships and after-image effects to convey movement in this wave of work.
In 1968, she was the first woman awarded the International Prize for Painting. That year, Riley and fellow op artist Peter Sedgley founded Space Provision Artistic, Cultural, and Educational (SPACE), an arts organization and studio space. In the early and mid 1970s, Riley continued to work with curves and stripes using a three-color palette, as seen in Rattle(1973), featuring alternating horizontal bands of diagonal stripes. The 1970s also brought a commercial demand for Riley's work.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Riley traded in curves for more vertical lines. A visit to Egypt inspired her to expand her color palette as illustrated in Achæan (1981), an oil painting with bright stripes in purples, blues, and oranges. Riley's work fell out of fashion in the 1980s, but she continued to work in her studio and was commissioned to design public spaces and sets.
The 1990s marked a shift in Riley's work as she used multicolored lozenges of various lengths and forms on a canvas, as seen in From Here (1994). Curves slowly returned to Riley's work as they were incorporated with her lozenges, appearing in Lagoon 2 (1997). The lozenge work transformed in the 2000s, becoming softer, sweeping forms in a muted palette. The two-canvas work Evoë 3 (2003) featured curves spliced on a diagonal plane in blue, beige, green, and lilac.
In 2022, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, held an exhibition of her work. Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction was the first exhibit of Riley's work in an American museum in more than two decades. Riley was invited to select all the works. In doing so, she demonstrated the progression of her development as an artist, from black and white, through experimentation using grays, to color.
Impact
Major retrospectives of Riley's work were hosted in the late 2000s through mid-2010s, including "Bridget Riley: The Stripe Paintings 1961–2014" at the David Zwirner Gallery in London, transforming the gallery to accommodate her large-scale paintings. In 2012, Riley was the first woman to receive the Dutch Sikkens Prize for her use of color in her art. The Bridget Riley Art Foundation continues her work in arts education with the Bridget Riley Fellowship at the British School at Rome and a project to expose university students outside of London to art.
Personal Life
Riley works and lives in London.
Bibliography
"Bridget Riley." David Zwirner Books, davidzwirnerbooks.com/artists/artist/bridget-riley. Accessed 25 Feb. 2017.
"Bridget Riley." Op-art.co.uk, www.op-art.co.uk/bridget-riley. Accessed 25 Feb. 2017.
"The Bridget Riley Fellowship 2017–18." British School at Rome, www.bsr.ac.uk/site2014/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/BRF-2017-18-leaflet.pdf. Accessed 25 Feb. 2017.
Dunn, Daisy. "Bridget Riley: A biography." Telegraph, 23 Nov 2010, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/8152203/Bridget-Riley-biography.html. Accessed 25 Feb. 2017.
Gottesman, Sarah. "The Neuroscience of Op Art." Artsy, 27 May 2016, www.artsy.net/article/the-art-genome-project-the-neuroscience-of-op-art. Accessed 25 Feb. 2017.
Higgins, Charlotte. "Bridget Riley Presented with Sikkens Prize for Her Work in Colour." Guardian, 29 Oct 2012, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/oct/29/bridget-riley-sikkens-prize-colour. Accessed 25 Feb. 2017.
Hudson, Mark. "Bridget Riley: How I Got My Curves Back." Telegraph, 15 June 2015, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/11674111/bridget-riley-interview.html. Accessed 25 Feb. 2017.
Kennedy, Maev. "Bridget Riley Pulls House Down for London Exhibition." Guardian, 12 June 2014, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/12/bridget-riley-london-exhibition. Accessed 25 Feb. 2017.
King, Essie. "Exhibitions That Defined Bridget Riley's Career." My Art Broker, 23 Feb. 2024, www.myartbroker.com/artist-bridget-riley/articles/exhibitions-that-defined-bridget-riley's-career. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.
Riley, Bridget. "At the End of My Pencil." London Review of Books, vol. 31, no. 19, 8 Oct 2009, www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n19/bridget-riley/at-the-end-of-my-pencil. Accessed 25 Feb. 2017.
Rosenberg, Karen. "Bridget Riley, Through Her Own Eyes." The New York Times, 17 Mar. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/03/17/arts/design/bridget-riley-op-artist.html. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.