Bridget Riley
Bridget Riley is a British painter and designer who is the most celebrated exponent of Op art, a major development of painting in the 1960s that used geometric forms to create optical effects
Riley was born in London and studied at Goldsmiths' College, 1949-52, and the Royal College of Art, 1952-5. Her interests in optical effects came partly through her study of the Neo-Impressionist technique of pointillism, but when she took up Op art in the early 1960s she worked initially in black-and-white. Since 1961, she 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.
She turned to colour in 1966, expanding the perceptual and optical possibilities of her compositions. By this time, she had attracted widespread attention (one of her paintings was used for the cover to the catalogue of the exhibition 'The Responsive Eye' at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1965, the exhibition that put Op art on the map), and the seal was set on her reputation when she won the International Painting Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1968.
Riley’s use of gradients and variations in tone stems from her admiration for the Pointillist Georges Seurat. “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,” she said of her work. “One moment, there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events.”
Riley's work shows a complete mastery of the effects characteristic of Op art, particularly subtle variations in size, shape, or placement of serialized units in an overall pattern. It is often on a large scale and she frequently makes use of assistants for the actual execution. Although her paintings often create effects of vibration and dazzle, she has also designed a decorative scheme for the interior of the Royal Liverpool Hospital (1983) that uses soothing bands of blue, pink, white, and yellow.
Riley currently lives and works in London. Her works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate, London, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.