Published on the occasion of Bridget Riley's major exhibition at David
Zwirner in London in the summer of 2014, this fully illustrated
catalogue offers intimate explorations of paintings and works on paper
produced by the legendary British artist over the past fifty years,
focusing specifically on her recurrent use of the stripe motif.
Riley has devoted her practice to actively engaging viewers through
elementary shapes such as lines, circles, curves, and squares, creating
visual experiences that at times trigger optical sensations of vibration
and movement. The London show, her most extensive presentation in the
city since her 2003 retrospective at Tate Britain, explored the stunning
visual variety she has managed to achieve working exclusively with
stripes, manipulating the surfaces of her vibrant canvases through
subtle changes in hue, weight, rhythm, and density. As noted by Paul
Moorhouse, "Throughout her development, Riley has drawn confirmation
from Euge`ne Delacroix's observation that 'the first merit of a
painting is to be a feast for the eyes.' [Her] most recent stripe
paintings are a striking reaffirmation of that principle, exciting and
entrancing the eye in equal measure."
Created in close collaboration with the artist, the publication's
beautifully produced color plates offer a selection of the iconic works
from the exhibition. These include the artist's first stripe works in
color from the 1960s, a series of vertical compositions from the 1980s
that demonstrate her so-called "Egyptian" palette--a "narrow chromatic
range that recalled natural phenomena"--and an array of her modestly
scaled studies, executed with gouache on graph paper and rarely before
seen.
A range of texts about Riley's original and enduring practice grounds
and contextualizes the images, including new scholarship by art
historian Richard Shiff, texts on both the artist's wall paintings and
newest body of work by Paul Moorhouse, 20th Century Curator at the
National Portrait Gallery in London, and a 1978 interview with Robert
Kudielka, her longtime confidant and foremost critic. Additionally, the
book features little-seen archival imagery of Riley at work over the
years; documentation of her recent commissions for St. Mary's Hospital
in West London, taken especially for this publication; and installation
views of the exhibition itself, installed throughout the three floors of
the gallery's eighteenth-century Georgian townhouse located in the heart
of Mayfair.