Bridget Riley grew up in a well-to-do family that sought refuge in Padstow (Cornwall) during the war. From early childhood, she developed a keen sense of observation and a strong affinity with nature. In 1949 she entered Goldsmiths College of Art to study drawing with Sam Rabin, before pursuing her education at the Royal College of Art in London (1952-1955). She then joined the J. Walter Thompson advertising firm, while paving her own path as an artist: she "abstracted" nature in highly contrasted pencil drawings (Men Lying Down, 1957-1958), and analysed the divisionist method by copying Seurat's Le Pont de Courbevoie. During summer courses organized by Harry Thubron in 1959, she met painter Maurice De Sausmarez who became her mentor, introduced her to futurism, divisionism, and the roots of modern art. She returned from their trip to Italy with landscapes displaying intense colours, animated by visible brush strokes (Pink Landscape, 1960). Falling prey to a personal and artistic breakdown in Fall of 1960, B. Riley created her first black and white painting, Kiss, in a geometric style not unlike hard-edge painting. The same year, she met painter Peter Sedgley, with whom she would create SPACE ten years later, an organization offering low-cost workshops. In 1961, she began to focus on her black and white paintings, in which the perception of stable elements (format, form, colour) is disrupted by different compositional processes, which, superimposed, cancel each other out and dissolve (Movement in Square, 1961). Her first solo exhibition at Gallery One in London in 1962 attracted the attention of critics. In 1965, William Seitz invited her to participate in the "Responsive Eye" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (New York). Quite receptive to European art, this event, which was meant to show the latest trends in abstract art, quickly turned into a fashion: the motifs of Op Art filled storefronts. A double-edged success for B. Riley, who, fearing the loss of all artistic credibility, insisted on suing the stores for copyright infringement, with the help of painter Barnett Newman's lawyer. In the late 1960s, her paintings were produced by assistants, after having previously studied their composition in several drawings. During the same period, she expanded her palette to include warm or cold shades of grey, as well as colour. The inclusion of pure colours introduced an additional level of instability in the perception of the works (Cataract 3,1967), leading her to then limit her pictorial process to straight lines and the interaction of two or three colours (Late Morning, 1967-1968). In 1968, recipient of the 34th Venice Biennale Grand Prize, she became the first woman and the first contemporary British painter to be granted this award. Her interest for German, Spanish, and Baroque art, rekindled during her travels with Robert Kudielka, pushed her to further diversify her shapes and colours – braids, curved lines, pastel hues – and to evolve towards a more lyrical style (Clepsydra 1, 1976). During a trip to Egypt in 1979 she discovered a specific palette (turquoise, blue, yellow, green, black, and white) she would use upon her return in a series of oil paintings. She once again used colourful vertical strips, but grouped liberally according to the feelings they conveyed, as well as their spatial characteristics (Serenissima, 1982). In the mid-1980s, the introduction of dynamic diagonals transformed the vertical structure that had defined that series thus far. These paintings that would then begin to sport diamond shapes, led the eye in a circular motion, pushing the artist to return to curvilinear forms in 1997. Her large scale paintings featuring big swathes of colour recall Matisse's work (Parade 2, 2002). In 1998, B. Riley created her first mural drawing: a composition made up of black circles on a white background, providing the viewer with contradictory sensations of movement and depth. As of 2007, she would also design several mural paintings that revisited the shapes featured in her contemporary paintings, by extending them beyond the frame. Since 1971, her body of work has been featured in many international retrospectives, and was rewarded in 2009 with the prestigious Kaiser Ring prize from the city of Goslar.
Anne MONTFORT
