Bridget Riley The Stripe Paintings 1961 2014

Bridget Riley: The Stripe Paintings 1961-2014

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.

Bridget Riley: Works from 1981-2015

Bridget Riley’s explorations of perception through form and color have made her into one of the most significant painters working today. Since the early 1960s, she has used elementary shapes—lines, circles, curves, and squares—to create visual experiences that immediately draw the viewer in, often triggering optical vibrations and illusions. More recently, Riley has shifted back to black and white in her large-scale paintings, marking a departure from her recent colored stripe paintings and a return to the palette of some of her earliest works. Published on the occasion of her 2015 solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Bridget Riley: Works 1981–2015 presents paintings from the last thirty-four years of her career, including images of Rajasthan, a wall painting previously shown in Germany and England, and exhibited for the first time in New York. These dynamic reproductions begin with stripe paintings from the 1980s and end with a coda of sorts —a return to black and white that ties back to her work from the 1960s, but bear traces of Riley’s deep engagement with color in the interim. As critic Éric de Chassey puts it in his essay for Riley’s 2015 catalogue with Galerie Max Hetzler: “The black-and-white paintings not only enter into a dialogue with the 1960s works, but take stock of every painting experience Riley has created during a long career.” Also included is a selection of the artist’s works on paper; taken together, these complementary aspects of her practice over the past four decades reveal the astonishing variety she has achieved by developing and rediscovering different forms. An essay by art historian Richard Shiff helps contextualize the developments in Riley’s practice since the early 1980s, and further emphasizes her influence and lineage as a painter. Rounding out the publication are biographical notes by Robert Kudielka, one of the artist’s foremost critics. With a career spanning six decades, Bridget Riley remains one of the most exciting painters today, and Bridget Riley: Works 1981–2015 presents a selection of works from what may be her richest period to date.

Bridget Riley