Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley, one of the leading abstract painters of her generation, holds a unique position in contemporary art. She has developed and extended the range of her interests ever since her first success in the 1960s, creating a body of work which is both consistent and highly varied. This volume, now fully revised and updated, reveals the mind behind this remarkable achievement, drawing together the most important texts and interviews of the last forty years. Riley's writings show a passionate engagement with her subjects and a great insight paired with a freshness of approach and an exceptional clarity of expression. Quite apart from providing a key to understanding her own work, this book is a fascinating document reflecting the issues and problems facing an artist in the 21st century.

Collected Writings 1965-2009

The Eye's Mind

Eric de Chassey

Renowned British artist Bridget Riley’s paintings have provoked powerful sensations through their formally taut, abstract compositions over the course of her more than six-decade career. In this new body of work, Riley returns to earlier ideas and takes them into further and surprising directions. As the artist has noted, “I am sometimes asked ‘What is your objective’ and this I cannot truthfully answer. I work ‘from’ something rather than ‘towards’ something. It is a process of discovery.” Since 1961, Riley has focused exclusively on seemingly simple geometric forms, such as lines, circles, curves, and squares, arrayed across a surface—whether a canvas, a wall, or paper—according to an internal logic. The resulting compositions actively engage the viewer, at times triggering sensations of vibration and movement. In the present selection, Riley advances her Measure for Measure series, her most extensive body of work to date, into a new, darker color palette—once again, changing the way we look and offering a powerful effect on our eyes. This sense of dynamism was explored to great effect in the artist’s earliest black-and-white paintings, which established the basis of her enduring formal vocabulary. In 2020, after visiting her own earlier works at her retrospective exhibition organized by the National Galleries of Scotland, Riley returned to black-and-white lozenges, adjusting the orientation of each shape to create a new visual sensation. Published on the occasion of the 2021 exhibition at David Zwirner, London, this monograph features new scholarship on the artist by art historian Éric de Chassey, who looks at how Riley’s past, in addition to the history of art, has led to this body of work.

Bridget Riley: Past into Present

Newly designed and expanded, the 2012 edition of Bridget Riley: Complete Prints includes every print from the early 1960s to the present day.This beautiful catalogue raisonne of Bridget Riley's graphic work now shows each print on its own page. Alongside a full colour inventory of the prints are essays by Lynne MacRitchie and Craig Hartley that together provide a greater context for Riley's work.Here, MacRitchie explores Riley's career as a printmaker focusing on different periods of activity. Hartley discusses the history of screenprinting and Riley's relationship to the medium.Including over 80 prints - featuring 5 new prints from 2011 - this book brings together a substantial body of cohesive works."

Studies, 1984-95

Lynne Cooke

John Elderfield

Essays by Lynne Cooke, John Elderfield. Foreword by Michael Govan.

Reconnaissance

Piet Mondrian

Tate Gallery

Haags Gemeentemuseum

The Mondrian collection in the Gemeentenmuseum is particularly strong on the early works, when the artist painted in the style of the Hague school. Mondrian's style changed dramatically in his forties, after his encounter between 1908 and 1911 with van Gogh, Pointillism and then Cubism.

Nature to Abstraction : from the Gemeentemuseum, the Hague

Mondrian

Contributions by Robert Kudielka, Raimund Stecker.

1961-1999 : ausgewählte Gemälde

Bridget Riley is one of Britain's most celebrated artists, and her career has been distinguished by a series of remarkable innovations. She first attracted critical attention with the dazzling black-and-white paintings she began to make in 1961. Her participation in the seminal exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1965 and her triumph at the Venice Biennale in 1968 - when she became the first living British painter to win the International Prize for painting - established her as an artist of the first rank. Bridget Riley surveys the artist's entire career and includes key examples of all phases of her work. It offers the opportunity both to review many early, celebrated paintings and to see these afresh in the context of recent works in which light, colour, movement and space are drawn into fresh and unexpected relationships. Numerous preparatory working studies are reproduced to illuminate the artist's complex and fascinating working processes. Essays from Paul Moorhouse, Richard Shiff and Robert Kudielka provide an overview of her art and career, along with new insights into the relation of Riley's work to theories of aesthetics and perception.

Michael Bracewell

Bridget Riley: Flashback is the first in a new series of monographic exhibitions from the Arts Council Collection. This book tracks Bridget Riley's career from its sensational beginnings in the early 1960s to the ambitious and powerful paintings and works on paper of recent years. It includes and essay by Michael Bracewell and a new text by the artist discussing her working practice. An illustrated chronology and an inventory of works by Riley in British public collections complete this survey.

Flashback

Neil MacGregor

Dialogues on Art with Neil MacGregor ... [et Al.]

Robert Kudielka

Bridget Riley is one of the outstanding figures of modern painting. For thirty-five years she has pursued a course of rigorous abstraction, from her celebrated Op Art works in black and white of the 1960s to the complex colour paintings of the 1990s. On the occasion of a major exhibition of her recent work at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1992, BBC Radio broadcast an illuminating series of five dialogues, each one between Riley and a well-known personality from the art world. These talks have been brought together in this volume, expertly edited by the art historian Robert Kudielka. With Neil MacGregor, Director of the National Gallery, London, she discusses the art of the past in relation to the present; with Sir Ernst Gombrich the perception of colour in painting; with the artist Michael Craig-Martin, the theory and practice of abstraction; and with the critics Bryan Robertson and Andrew Graham-Dixon she talks about the events and travels that have shaped her life as an artist.

Dialogues on Art

Hugo Chapman

Isabel Seligman

A show touring US museums examines the process and practice of drawing, showcasing over 500 years of work from Michelangelo to the present day

Michelangelo to Bridget Riley: Drawings from the British Museum

Lines of Thought

Richard Shiff

The quest for discovery through looking is the driving force of Bridget Riley’s work, as she has written: “More than anything else I want my paintings to exist on their own terms. That is to say they must stealthily engage and disarm you. There the paintings hang, deceptively simple—telling no tales as it were—resisting, in a well-behaved way, all attempts to be questioned, probed or stared at and then, for those with open eyes, serenely disclosing some intimations of the splendors to which pure sight alone has the key.” This publication unfolds along the lines of Riley’s 2018 exhibition at David Zwirner, London. Beginning with an exploration of black-and-white equilateral triangles, Riley leads the viewer into an awareness of the ways in which a surface—wall or canvas—can affect a seemingly simple form: the triangle. While she demonstrates these subtle changes, Riley manipulates this form by bending its sides. At first sight the viewer may experience this as a breaking apart, but as one continues to look, serpentine movements appear, or large shadowy triangles, which advance and recede. These paintings constantly reinvent themselves through looking. Riley is revisiting and developing works which she initiated over fifty years ago, as is shown here by the inclusion of Black to White Discs (1962/1965) in the exhibition. This diamond formation of discs, which graduates in tone from white to black and back again, offers a lead-in to her new body of work. In Cosmos and the Measure for Measure series, Riley recalls a group of subtly shaded colors used this time in discs. While the compositions remain fundamentally the same, the play of colors changes every time. The exhibition ends with a surprisingly spacious wall painting that offers the viewer many delights, not least among them a dance of fugitive white lights. Here, Riley disarms the viewer, encouraging us once again in an adventure of discovery. In his essay, Richard Shiff explores Riley’s ability to give new life to basic forms as she invites the audience, any audience, to help participate in the painting.

Bridget Riley: Recent Paintings 2014-2017

Dave Hickey

Paintings, 1982-2000, and Early Works on Paper : September 22-October 21, 2000

Bridget Riley’s explorations of perception through form and color have made her into one of the most significant painters working today. Since the early 1960s, she has used elementary shapes—lines, circles, curves, and squares—to create visual experiences that immediately draw the viewer in, often triggering optical vibrations and illusions. More recently, Riley has shifted back to black and white in her large-scale paintings, marking a departure from her recent colored stripe paintings and a return to the palette of some of her earliest works. Published on the occasion of her 2015 solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Bridget Riley: Works 1981–2015 presents paintings from the last thirty-four years of her career, including images of Rajasthan, a wall painting previously shown in Germany and England, and exhibited for the first time in New York. These dynamic reproductions begin with stripe paintings from the 1980s and end with a coda of sorts —a return to black and white that ties back to her work from the 1960s, but bear traces of Riley’s deep engagement with color in the interim. As critic Éric de Chassey puts it in his essay for Riley’s 2015 catalogue with Galerie Max Hetzler: “The black-and-white paintings not only enter into a dialogue with the 1960s works, but take stock of every painting experience Riley has created during a long career.” Also included is a selection of the artist’s works on paper; taken together, these complementary aspects of her practice over the past four decades reveal the astonishing variety she has achieved by developing and rediscovering different forms. An essay by art historian Richard Shiff helps contextualize the developments in Riley’s practice since the early 1980s, and further emphasizes her influence and lineage as a painter. Rounding out the publication are biographical notes by Robert Kudielka, one of the artist’s foremost critics. With a career spanning six decades, Bridget Riley remains one of the most exciting painters today, and Bridget Riley: Works 1981–2015 presents a selection of works from what may be her richest period to date.

Bridget Riley

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