Description
This sense of dynamism was explored to great effect in the artist's earliest black-and-white paintings, which established the basis of her enduring formal vocabulary. In 2020, after visiting her own earlier works at her retrospective exhibition organized by the National Galleries of Scotland, Riley returned to black-and-white lozenges, adjusting the orientation of each shape to create a new visual sensation. In 1967, Riley introduced colour into her work, thus expanding the perceptual and optical possibilities of her compositions.
Published on the occasion of the 2021 exhibition at David Zwirner, London, this monograph features new scholarship on the artist by art historian Eric de Chassey, who looks at how Riley's past, as well as previous artists, has led to this body of work.
Renowned British artist Bridget Riley's paintings have provoked powerful sensations through their formally taut, abstract compositions over the course of her more than six-decade career. In this new body of work, Riley returns to earlier ideas and takes them into further and surprising directions.
About the Author
One of the most significant artists working today, Bridget Riley's dedication to the interaction of form and color has led to a continued exploration of perception. From the early 1960s, she has used elementary shapes such as lines, circles, curves, and squares to create visual experiences that actively engage the viewer, at times triggering optical sensations of vibration and movement. Her earliest black-and-white compositions offer impressions of several other pigments, while ensuing, multi-chromatic works present color as an active component. Although abstract, her practice is closely linked with nature, which she understands to be "the dynamism of visual forces-an event rather than an appearance."
Eric de Chassey is the director of the Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris, and a professor of modern and contemporary art history at the Ecole normale superieure in Lyon, France. Between 2009 and 2015, he was the director of the French Academy in Rome, Villa Medici. He has published extensively on American and European art, transatlantic cultural relationships, and the visual culture of the second half of the twentieth century.
Book Information
ISBN 9781644230664
Author Bridget Riley
Format Hardback
Page Count 80
Imprint David Zwirner
Publisher David Zwirner
Weight(grams) 860g