BRIDGET RILEY - NEW WORK

BRIDGET RILEY (1931-)

In the sixties, the British artist Bridget Riley entered new visual and artistic territory with her abstract pictures. The economy of pictorial means achieved in her works is quite unique and had a style-forming effect on all directions of so-called Radical Painting, and much further.
The concise overview of the artist's newer works presented here emphasizes their immense importance for the contemporary practice of painting in the international art scene: After her first pictures, rigorously painted in black and white, she soon extended her expressive spectrum with color contrasts and, using only five colors at the beginning, began to explore their interactions. Since about 1980 she has also been mixing a larger number of colors to form blocks and ensembles in free rhythms. Recently, Bridget Riley has abandoned the strictly formal pattern of a structure of stripes for a vertical register of broad striations crossed by diagonals, and she now uses up to 20 different color shades - a flexibility which brings with it a more differentiated view of the relationships between colors. In her newest series of pictures, Riley returns to exploring curves and diagonals extending beyond picture boundaries and their exciting relations to the color structure of painting.

The artist:

Bridget Riley, born 1931 in London. In 1965, participation in "The Responsive Eye" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1968, International Award for Painting at the 34th Biennale in Venice. In 2000, extensive retrospective, Dia Art Foundation, New York.

Edited by Martin Hentschel, texts by Martin Hentschel, Lynn MacRitchie