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.