Artist 101

British artist Bridget Riley is recognised for her lifelong engagement with abstraction and painting reduced to its essentials. While she pioneered the Op Art movement in the 1960s, she continues to work today and was recently the subject of a retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London.

In September 2021, Bonhams will hold Blazing a Trail, a sale celebrating the pioneering work of British women artists – including Bridget Riley. Ahead of the auction, here we look at Riley's life and work, from her early years in Cornwall to today.

1.

Riley's Early Life

Although Riley was born in London in 1931, she spent much of her time in Cornwall during her childhood, as a result of the Second World War. Riley often cites this time as a great source of artistic inspiration, having closely observed the light, colour and shapes of her natural surroundings - all of which would become key aspects of Riley's work later in life.

She studied at the Royal Academy of Arts and Goldsmiths College between 1949 and 1955, where she initially painted in a semi-impressionist style. Before transitioning to being a full-time artist, Riley worked as an art teacher and as an illustrator for an advertising agency; the influence of the latter is clear in Riley’s Op Art, which shares the clean and graphic lines so common in adverts.

Iain MacMillan (British, 1938-2006), Bridget Riley, circa 1962. Sold for £ 1,785 inc. premium

Bridget Riley, (British, born 1931), Untitled (La Lune en Rodage - Carlo Belloli). Sold for £ 11,312 inc. premium

Lot 55. Bridget Riley (British, born 1931), Elapse. Estimate: £ 7,000 - 10,000

2. Op Art

Riley began experimenting with the Op Art style in the early 1960s, amongst other key members such as Victor Vasarely and Richard Anuszkiewicz. The term ‘Op Art’ was first coined in 1964 by Time Magazine, and was the main subject of the 1965 group international exhibition, The Responsive Eye, at the MOMA, which featured Riley amongst other artists such as Yaacov Agam. The exhibition was a pivotal moment - not just for the Op Art movement, but for Riley’s international recognition. Op Art quickly became part of the cultural zeitgeist of the Swinging Sixties and still remains a key art movement today.

Op Art employs and explores the key essentials of painting - shape, line and colour - which often induce optical illusions and disorientating effects on the eye: shapes might appear to move, or new colours might start to emerge. By doing so, the movement explores long-running interests in art history, including Goethe’s 1810 Theory of Colours, which explored the psychological effect of colours on emotions, and Josef Albers’ 1950s theories of ‘color function’. The Impressionists' pointillism, too, similarly explored the effects of colour and dots on our perception. Riley herself was particularly influenced by pointillism, with her copy of Seurat’s The Bridge at Courbevoie still hanging in her studio.

3. The Development of Riley's Work

Riley’s pared-back and simple black and white shapes are characteristic of her early work in the 1960s. Colours emerged into her practice from 1967, and marked a turning point in her work as she moved away from the more dependent and solid monochrome colour scheme, and instead began to embrace the relativity of how we perceive colour. Yellow Affected by Red and Blue 1974, for example, employs each colour in tall stripes to explore - as its name might suggest - how our perception of each colour affects the other. In 1981, Riley’s colour palette was further inspired by the colourful hieroglyphics she saw during a trip to Egypt. She coined the term ‘Egyptian Palette’ to describe her use of colours, exclaiming that ‘the colours are purer and more brilliant than any I had used before’.

The ‘Lozenge Paintings’ are another group of Riley’s works that appeared in the 1980s and 90s, in which diagonal ‘lozenges’ of certain colours were arranged to make up the whole canvas in a hard-edge manner. These produce a sense of rhythm and depth, as seen in J uly 23 Bassacs, which sold for £ 15,000 inc. premium in 2014, as well as New Day which is going under the hammer in September. The 'Lozenge Paintings' later evolved into ‘Curvilinear Paintings’ in the 2000s, as exampled by Revision of January 10. These paintings saw Riley employ a more limited colour palette - using a maximum of five different colours - and the curvature of the previously straight-edged lozenges.

While Riley's work has always embraced experimentation, her overall oeuvre shares a thread of common characteristics: an exploration of form, movement, contrast, shape, and line.

Bridget Riley (British, born 1931), Yellow affected by Red and Blue 1974. Sold for £ 40,000 inc. premium

Lot 56. Bridget Riley (British, born 1931), New Day. Estimate: £7,000 - 10,000

Lot 57. Bridget Riley (British, born 1931), Revision of January 10. Estimate: £50,000 - 80,000

Bridget Riley (British, born 1931), 4 Colours (9 Whites, 3rd Group) Study 1 for Summer Paintings. Sold for £ 65,000 inc. premium

4. Process

Riley’s process is meticulous and it often takes months to produce a single work. Colours are carefully mixed to achieve specific hues and intensities, and Riley experiments with compositions through small gouache colour studies before moving to full-size paper-ad-gouache designs. Finally, canvases are used, which are marked up and painted entirely by hand: first in acrylics, then in oil. As Riley states, this process is vital to her work: ‘It seems to me […] that it is in making the decisions – rejecting and accepting, altering and revising – that an artist’s deeper, real personality comes through'.

Studies for Riley’s paintings are often sold at auction and achieve high prices. 4 Colours (9 Whites, 3^rd Group) Study 1 for Summer Paintings, for example, was sold for £65,000 in 2018, its title highlighting just how specific Riley's study processes are for each painting.

5.

Recognition

Since her first solo exhibition in 1962 at London’s Victor Musgrave of Gallery One, Riley has been the recipient of multiple awards and the focus of many important shows. In 1963, she was awarded the AICA Critics Prize and two years later was part of the exhibition The Responsive Eye, launching Riley’s international recognition. In 1968 she received an International Painting Prize at the Venice Biennal, has received several honorary doctorates by Oxbridge universities and, in 2012, became the first woman to receive the Dutch Sikkens Prize.

Her works are included in museum collections including the Tate, London, the Nationalgalerie, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Stedelijk Museum - to name a few. Recently, Riley was the subject of a career retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery as well as in the Hayward Gallery in London.

Bridget Riley (British, born 1931), Study for Painting with Verticals - Cadence 4 2006. Sold for £93,812 inc. premium

A selection of fantastic Bridget Riley works will be offered as part of our upcoming sale, Blazing a Trail: Modern British Women, on 29 September 2021.

To keep up to date with our Modern British and Irish Art team, follow @bonhamsmodbrit on Instagram.

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