Bridget Riley is an English artist whose vibrant optical pattern paintings were central to the Op art movement of the 1960s. Bridget Riley's geometric paintings implore the viewer to reflect on how it physically feels to look.
Background
Bridget Riley was born in Norwood, London. Her father, John Fisher Riley, was a printer and owned his own business. He relocated his firm and the family to Lincolnshire in 1938 and when the Second World War broke out a year later, he was drafted into the army. While on active duty, he was captured by the Japanese and forced to work on the Siamese railway. He survived, but Riley remembers he was never the same. She recalls how "he had learned to live in a self-contained way, to isolate himself from what was around him."
During the war years, Riley was sent with her mother, sister, and aunt to live in Cornwall, near the seaside town of Padstow. While she was there, she was given a great deal of freedom. Later she would claim that these early experiences roaming the countryside, spending hours watching cloud formations and the shifting light throughout the day, strongly informed her artistic practice.
Education
After attending secondary school at Cheltenham Ladies' College, she studied first at Goldsmith's college of art at the University of London during 1949 - 1952, and then at the Royal College of Art, also in London, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1955. While there, she met fellow students Peter Blake and Frank Auerbach. Being exposed to the London art scene for the first time, Riley found her studies at the Royal College of Art difficult, and she faced the dilemma most modern painters also experienced: "What should I paint, and how should I paint it?"
After leaving college, Riley returned to Lincolnshire to care for her father, who suffered from injuries sustained in a car accident. While there, she underwent a physical and mental breakdown. She returned to Cornwall in an attempt to recuperate, but the stay did little to revive her health. After returning to London in 1956, she was hospitalized for six months. During this period her artistic productivity diminished along with her weak health.
In 1956, Riley saw an important exhibition of American Abstract Expressionist painters at London's Tate Gallery. She returned to painting seriously again, exploring the lessons of Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. The following year she was sufficiently recovered to take a job teaching art at a girls' school in Harrow, near London.
Two years later, in 1958, she left teaching to become a commercial illustrator. That year, visiting an exhibition on "The Developing Process", she became interested in the ideas of Harry Thurbon, a teacher at the Leeds School of Art. Thurbon was a proponent of a new form of arts education that moved away from romantic ideas of expression toward concrete skills, embracing a connection to professional contexts, such as illustration and design. Thurbon's ideas echoed the much earlier ideas of form and function taught at the Bauhaus, which was an important inspiration in early Op art.
Riley attended Thurbon's well-known summer school in Norfolk, where she met influential artist, writer, and educator Maurice de Sausmarez. The pair began an intense relationship, and with de Sausmarez acting as her mentor, Riley began to expand her knowledge of the history of art and culture. In 1960, the couple traveled to Italy, where Riley painted the countryside and took in the art of the Futurists, especially the paintings of Boccioni and Balla, as well as the frescoes of Pierro della Francesca, and the black and white Romanesque facades found on the churches of Ravenna and Pisa.
On her return to London, Riley synthesized her experiences into her first geometric patterned paintings. She continued to develop this new, bold abstract style over the next year. In 1962, in a legendary bit of luck, she took shelter from a sudden rainstorm in Victor Musgrave's London gallery, and he offered her a show. This first exhibition met with great critical acclaim, and over the following decade she was included in many of the well-known survey shows that came to define British painting in the 1960s, including the 1963 "New Generation" exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, with artists such as Allen Jones and David Hockney.
In 1965, Riley made her debut in the United States with a sold-out solo show at the Richard Feigen Gallery and with a prominent place in The Museum of Modern Art's influential exhibition of Op art, "The Responsive Eye." Unfortunately, this rapid success led to one of the more difficult moments in her career. In later accounts, Riley recalled her drive from the airport to the museum, passing shop window after window with dresses whose fabrics were inspired by Op art or, in some cases, taken directly from her paintings.
Despite the affinity between many Op art artists and the textile and design industries, she was dismayed by the commercialization of her work and claimed "the whole thing had spread everywhere even before I touched down at the airport." She tried to sue the designers of one of the dresses but was unsuccessful. Riley said at the time that "it will take at least 20 years before anyone looks at my paintings seriously again."
While Op art's critical acclaim suffered in the United States due to its rapid commercialization, Riley continued to enjoy success in Britain. After 1967, Riley introduced color into her previously black and white paintings and has continued her explorations of form, color, and space to the present. In 1968, Riley worked with Peter Sedgley (her partner at the time) and Peter Townsend (a journalist) to create SPACE, an artists' organization that assisted artists looking for studio space and fostered community.
In 1981, Riley traveled to Egypt. She was moved by the dynamic use of color in ancient Egyptian art, saying that "the colors are purer and more brilliant than any I had used before." She was fascinated by the way Egyptian artists managed to use only a few colors to represent what she described as the "light-mirroring desert" around them. Her paintings after this trip contained a freer arrangement of colors than she had previously used, and a palette inspired by the Egyptian art she had seen.
In the later 1980s and 1990s, Riley completed a number of large-scale, site-specific commissions. For example, in 1983 Riley painted a series of murals on the interior of the Royal Liverpool Hospital. The color scheme she chose was intended to make the patients calmer, and the murals significantly lowered the rates of vandalism and graffiti within the hospital.
Riley continues to produce art today. She works from several studios, including in her home in South Kensington, where four out of the five floors are dedicated to artistic production. Although Op art's visibility diminished over the last decades, Riley's example of pursuing tradition and innovation has inspired a younger generation of painters seeking to enliven the medium. She currently lives and works in London, Cornwall and the Vaucluse in France.
Encircling Discs With Grey in Grey to Black Sequence
Shadow Play
Breathe
Loss
Carnival
Blaze Study
RA 2
Black to White Disks
Zing 1
Untitled (Fragment 1)
Two Blues
Fission
Pause
Rose Rose (London 2012 Olympic Games Poster)
Intake
Movement in Squares
Arrest 2
Hesitate
Arrest 3
Ecclesia
Conversation
Composition with Circles 5
Oval Axis: Cerise, Turquoise, Ochre
Orient 4
Static 2
Chant 2
Fete
Fall
Nataraja
Descending
Achean
Arrest 1
Drift 2
Fragment 2
Cataract 3
Fold
Untitled (Winged Curve)
Views
Grounded in her own optical experiences and not color theories, math, or science, Riley experiments with structural units, such as squares, ovals, stripes, and curves in various configurations and colors to explore the physical and psychological responses of the eye. Her paintings inspired textile designs and psychedelic posters over the decades, but her objectives have always been to interrogate what and how we see and to provoke both uncertainty and clarity with her paintings.
Steeped in the paintings of the Impressionist, Post-Impressionists, and the Futurists, Riley dissects the visual experience of the earlier modern masters without their reliance on figures, landscapes, or objects. Playing with figure/ground relations and the interactions of color, Riley presents the viewer with a multitude of dynamic, visual sensations.
Riley's artistic practice is grounded in a utopian, social vision. She views her art as an inherently social act, as the viewer completes the experience of the painting. This belief in an interactive art led her to resist the commercialization, and in her mind, the vulgarization of Op art by the fashion world.
Quotations:
"Fashion always plays a part in the art world, but when it gets the upper hand it spells a vacuum."
"I couldn't get near what I wanted through seeing, recognizing and recreating, so I stood the problem on its head. I started studying squares, rectangles, triangles and the sensations they give rise to."
“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.”
Membership
She was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. Today, Riley is often grouped along with other practitioners of Op Art such as Victor Vasarely and Richard Anuszkiewicz.