Bridget Riley: Wall Works 1983–2023

Since the beginning of her career, Bridget Riley (b. 1931) has constantly redefined the concept of abstraction and its possibilities for the painterly process. Aware of how individual and collective experiences taint one’s vision of the world, the artist creates works that free colour and form from their illustrative potential, enabling what she refers to as ‘pure sight’. Riley develops paintings through the accumulation and distribution of simple forms – vertical and horizontal stripes, squares, circles and ovals, triangles, rhomboids, and curves – coming together into complex arrangements fostering a sense of dynamism, and rhythm. Her paintings seem to flicker and pulsate. Riley’s profound observations of movement, light and colour have given rise to a complex and continuously evolving oeuvre that underlies a long-standing fascination for the physical process of perception.

‘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, 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.’

J. Elderfield, ‘Creating a Way of Looking’, in Bridget Riley: Die Streifenbilder: The Stripe Painting 1961–2012, exh. cat., Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin; Berlin/London: Holzwarth Publications and Ridinghouse, 2013