Bridget Riley
24 May - 30 Jun 2007
© Bridget Riley
Blue Painting (Painting with Verticals, Cadence 5) (2006)
Oil on canvas 193.5 x 387.8cm
Blue Painting (Painting with Verticals, Cadence 5) (2006)
Oil on canvas 193.5 x 387.8cm
BRIDGET RILEY
"New Paintings New Gouaches"
This will be the first exhibition of Bridget Riley's work at Green On Red Gallery since her retrospective at Tate Modern in 2003. For this show, the Gallery will be exhibiting two new paintings and six gouaches. Each work is an exquisite, disciplined, and formidable representation of what the eye sees in nature, and in Riley's case, it is a visceral physical visual experience to stand before her work.
For those who are new to Bridget Riley's painting, this exhibition will give them a unique opportunity to study her latest work at a time when the Op Art movement of painting has undergone a renaissance of critical and curatorial re-evaluation and attention. Riley first became associated with Op Art in the mid-1960s following the groundbreaking exhibition, The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965. She won the International Prize in the 1968 Venice Biennale and she has gone on to have major museum and gallery exhibitions around the world. Her retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2003 was widely celebrated as a tour de force. In 2008 she will have a solo exhibition at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Riley has frequently spoken of her practice and the science of optics and light. She maintains that far from trying to paint a purely clinical visual conundrum for viewers to be challenged by, that her work has grown out of the experience of looking. While her early black and white and monochrome grey works felt like a deliberate assault on the viewer's effort to gaze at the work and thus to 'own' it, her practice shifted in 1966 to embrace colour – vertical stripes at first which were then followed by the use of rhomboid forms and later still, with undulating diagonals of colour. These developments have prompted critical discussions ranging from the architecture of colour to the musical elements of her work to the plasticity of form and the use of colour.
'...my work has grown out of my own experiences of looking, and also out of the work I have seen in museums and in galleries, so I have seen other artists seeing and that has been an enormous help to me and a kind of pattern maker, in that it has shown me how a formal structure of looking is changed and can shape in turn the way that one proceeds with one’s own work.'
She acknowledges her debt to such painters as Seurat, Matisse, and Monet, to name but a few, and she has curated major exhibitions and delivered papers on such artists as Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee, for whom she has a particular regard.
This latest body of work continues Riley's experimentations. She has begun to re-employ the use of verticals at varying intervals in the work, and this increases the viewer’s awareness of the movement/interruptions, forms and the rhythms by which we read her work. Riley continues to enthrall, not least because of the works’ confident ability to communicate the sheer power of painting.
"New Paintings New Gouaches"
This will be the first exhibition of Bridget Riley's work at Green On Red Gallery since her retrospective at Tate Modern in 2003. For this show, the Gallery will be exhibiting two new paintings and six gouaches. Each work is an exquisite, disciplined, and formidable representation of what the eye sees in nature, and in Riley's case, it is a visceral physical visual experience to stand before her work.
For those who are new to Bridget Riley's painting, this exhibition will give them a unique opportunity to study her latest work at a time when the Op Art movement of painting has undergone a renaissance of critical and curatorial re-evaluation and attention. Riley first became associated with Op Art in the mid-1960s following the groundbreaking exhibition, The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965. She won the International Prize in the 1968 Venice Biennale and she has gone on to have major museum and gallery exhibitions around the world. Her retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2003 was widely celebrated as a tour de force. In 2008 she will have a solo exhibition at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Riley has frequently spoken of her practice and the science of optics and light. She maintains that far from trying to paint a purely clinical visual conundrum for viewers to be challenged by, that her work has grown out of the experience of looking. While her early black and white and monochrome grey works felt like a deliberate assault on the viewer's effort to gaze at the work and thus to 'own' it, her practice shifted in 1966 to embrace colour – vertical stripes at first which were then followed by the use of rhomboid forms and later still, with undulating diagonals of colour. These developments have prompted critical discussions ranging from the architecture of colour to the musical elements of her work to the plasticity of form and the use of colour.
'...my work has grown out of my own experiences of looking, and also out of the work I have seen in museums and in galleries, so I have seen other artists seeing and that has been an enormous help to me and a kind of pattern maker, in that it has shown me how a formal structure of looking is changed and can shape in turn the way that one proceeds with one’s own work.'
She acknowledges her debt to such painters as Seurat, Matisse, and Monet, to name but a few, and she has curated major exhibitions and delivered papers on such artists as Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee, for whom she has a particular regard.
This latest body of work continues Riley's experimentations. She has begun to re-employ the use of verticals at varying intervals in the work, and this increases the viewer’s awareness of the movement/interruptions, forms and the rhythms by which we read her work. Riley continues to enthrall, not least because of the works’ confident ability to communicate the sheer power of painting.