Early Success

After attending Goldsmiths University and the Royal College of Art in the 1950s, Riley briefly worked in advertising before making it as a professional artist. She won the International Prize for Painting when she represented Great Britain at the 1968 Venice Biennale, becoming the first woman to win that prize. This huge honour reflected her position at the pinnacle of visual culture in the 1960s: her monochrome paintings that used geometric shapes and patterns to mimic movement and confuse the eye had become emblematic of the swinging sixties.

The futuristic kineticism
of Riley's play
with vision and cognition
paralleled the speed
of change in the 60s

Bert Stern’s 1967 photograph of the supermodel Twiggy in front of a work by Riley has become an iconic artwork in its own right, prints of which now sell for high prices. It captures the spirit of the decade, with its dramatic break with the aesthetic of the past. Riley’s work influenced fashion designers in particular, with blocky, monochrome patterns appearing in the designs of people like Ossie Clarke, Mary Quant, and Rudi Gernreich. The futuristic kineticism of her play with vision and cognition paralleled the speed of change in the 60s, as a trip to the moon became something real rather than imagined.

Riley’s Inspirations

Riley herself was heavily inspired by much older visual culture. Her earliest works were directly influenced by nineteenth-century French artists, especially the Pointillist Georges Seurat. She called him ‘an abstract painter before abstract painting emerged as a thing in its own right.’ Even after shifting into her signature geometric Op Art style, she continued to have the French Impressionists in mind. Her evolution into her own unique way of painting from this starting point reflects her interest in finding new ways of using paint to explore optical perception.

In 1979, Riley visited Egypt for the first time, visiting the tombs of the later Pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings, which were still in situ in their ancient burial sites carved into rock. She was overwhelmed by the colour palette used in the wall paintings there, and noticed that it was used throughout the ancient Egyptian artefacts she encountered on her trip.

When she returned to London in the spring of 1980, she was inspired to paint using these colours, but was concerned about appropriating a visual culture that did not belong to her. She chose to work from memory rather than visual references, giving what she eventually called her ‘Egyptian palette’ a personality all her own. In a 2011 interview, she told Michale Harrison that it was “a very strong, sturdy group of colours with infinite flexibility.”

Myrrh (1985), which leads Bonhams’ April 20th/21st Century Art Evening Sale, is one of the later iterations of this practice. Comparing it with earlier works in the Egyptian palette, like Ka 7 (1980) and Luxor (1982), shows how Riley’s memory of these colours continued to evolve as she worked. By 1985, the palette had a lighter, more electric, almost pastel hue, compared with the earthy tones of the early works.

Lasting Influence

While Riley’s work has evolved over the seven decades of her career, her basic ethos has remained the same. The bold drama of her lines and starkness of her palettes make her work instantly recognisable. Although her early work remains synonymous with the 1960s, her influence extends across the late twentieth century and through the present.

After her hugely commercialised success in her early career, Riley kept innovating. Her move into colour and curving forms influenced a new wave of fashion designers, including Marimekko. The long term-legacy of her monochrome designs continues to be felt by designers in the twenty-first century, too, including Dries van Noten, Christopher Kane, Bottega Veneta, and Kenzo.

Despite her sharp newness, Riley situates herself fully in the heritage of art history. She, too, continues to be influenced by other artists, from Henri Matisse to Paul Klee. Her incredibly long career remains seismically relevant to the worlds of pop culture and fine art alike.

20th/21st Century Art Evening Sale
2 April, London