Bridget Riley may be best known for her analysis of optical phenomena in geometrical black and white paintings that define her starting point and made her one of the central figures in the Op art movement of the 60’s. In the stunning colour work that followed, she continued her exploration of perception through the relationship between structure and colour, always causing disorientation to the viewer’s eye, as her paintings seem to flicker, to pulsate and to convey an internal life. Bridget Riley, continuously carrying out new experiments, created her first wall painting in 2007. Besides her artistic practice, her theoretical writings had a considerable influence on a younger generation of artists.
"To follow very closely Riley’s work is to see that sameness is courted – because repetition is crucial to an artistic practice – but sameness is also avoided, because it is in the character of a true artistic practice to create change. So, to follow her work is to see that the continuity of artistic identity is asserted, not despite change, but because of change: because change is the very means of achieving continuity. [...] The surprise of the first encounter with one of her paintings is owing to an astonishment that an inanimate object has apparently come to life and – more than that – is in communion with the viewer. The viewer’s surprise is, we recognise, is a self-created surprise. Perception is the medium just as much as is the canvas and the paint – more so, in that a painting, the artist acknowledges, ‘only comes to life when looked at from a certain distance’. In a way, it doesn’t exist factually at all; only in the viewer’s perception."
John Elderfield, Creating a way of looking in Bridget Riley: Die Streifenbilder / The Stripe Paintings 1961-2012, Galerie Max Hetzler, Holzwarth Publications and Ridinghouse, 2013
