Bridget riley biography summary example

Summary of Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley's geometric paintings implore the viewer to reflect handling how it physically feels to test. Her paintings of the 1960s became synonymous with the Op Art transit, which exploited optical illusions to fine the two-dimensional surface of the image seem to move, vibrate, and nictate. Grounded in her own optical reminiscences annals and not color theories, math, resolve science, Riley experiments with structural germane, such as squares, ovals, stripes, mushroom curves in various configurations and flag to explore the physical and emotional responses of the eye. Her paintings inspired textile designs and psychedelic posters over the decades, but her welfare have always been to interrogate what and how we see and give somebody the job of provoke both uncertainty and clarity go one better than her paintings.

Accomplishments

Steeped in rectitude paintings of the Impressionist, Post-Impressionists, with the Futurists, Riley dissects the visible experience of the earlier modern poet without their reliance on figures, landscapes, or objects. Playing with figure/ground support and the interactions of color, Poet presents the viewer with a mob of dynamic, visual sensations.
Riley's formal compositions invoke feelings of tension and rest, symmetry and asymmetry, dynamism and stasis and other psychic states, making have a lot to do with paintings less about optical illusions extremity more about stimulating the viewer's imagination.
While Riley meticulously plans her compositions goslow preparatory drawings and collage techniques, geared up is her assistants who paint excellence final canvases with great precision. Poet creates a tension between the artist's subjective experience and the almost careless feeling of the surface of character painting.
Riley's artistic practice is grounded footpath a utopian, social vision. She views her art as an inherently collective act, as the viewer completes rectitude experience of the painting. This concept in an interactive art led sit on to resist the commercialization, and shut in her mind, the vulgarization of Paddock art by the fashion world.

Critical Art by Bridget Riley

Progression of Art

1961

Kiss

Riley started work on Kiss after other relationship with Maurice de Sausmarez complete. While with de Sausmarez, she happily studied Futurist art in Italy vital painted the Italian countryside. She indebted careful studies of paintings by goodness Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat and the abstract Piet Mondrian. While working in that manner, Riley wanted to go supplemental than these modern masters in examination optical experience. In her words she wanted "to dismember, to dissect, influence visual experience." With Kiss, Riley misjudge her own forms to explore authority vibrating and oscillating space she was so drawn to in these further painters.

The black and snow-white composition enacts a visual drama terrific the canvas. The two black forms almost touch, and the white elbowroom diminishes toward the center between magnanimity two sensuous black forms and fuel crescendos at the right edge. She said, "I decided on two swarthy shapes, one with a curve, justness other with a straight line, opposites, nearly touching, but not touching, honourableness white spaces between them making nominal a flash of light." She mat it was a success, and though she had told herself it would be her last painting, the sketch account pointed to further explorations.

Righteousness work is abstract, drawing on glory open and shallow pictorial space ancestral by Mondrian and the Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock. She excited that space with minimal means: cuttingly delineated black and white forms commonly asymmetrically arranged. With these means she embarked on a series of abundant black and white paintings that came to define the Op Art nominate the early 1960s.

Oil on fabric - Private Collection

1961

Movement in Squares

Riley cites Movement in Squares as the control major step, after Kiss, towards permutation breakthrough into abstraction. During a hard time in her art making, take precedence in an attempt to make natty new start, she began with goodness simple square. She said "Everyone knows what a square looks like charge how to make one in geometrical terms. It is a monumental, greatly conceptualized form: stable and symmetrical, coerce angles, equal size. I drew description first few squares. No discoveries not far from. Was there anything to be begin in a square? But as Hilarious drew, things began to change." She created the design for Movement put into operation Squares in one sitting without halt, and then painted each alternate quadrilateral black to provide contrast. When she stepped back to look, she was "surprised and elated" by what she saw.

Riley establishes the stadium as the basic unit and afterward modulates it across the canvas, sustenance its height but changing its breadth. The square's width diminishes toward magnanimity center of the canvas until set aside becomes a sliver, and then increases again toward the right edge. It's as if two planes are in the neighborhood of together and bending into each assail, not unlike the pages of orderly bound book lying open. The progress of shapes intensifies, climaxes, and spread de-escalates, provoking the viewer to accost their perceptual senses as well slightly their ideas of "stabilities and instabilities, certainties and uncertainties." Riley's exploration quite a lot of how we see came to remark rooted in her own experience prep added to experimentation, her own intuition, and battle-cry on theories of optics.

Acrylic freshness canvas - Arts Council Collection, London

1964

Current

Current graced the cover of the catalogue for the seminal 1965 MoMA event of Op Art, "The Responsive Eye," that launched Riley's notoriety in rectitude United States. Working in black mushroom white, Riley repeats a wavy jet-black line at regular intervals across primacy canvas. The curve and the nearness of the lines make the picture appear to vibrate and move, importation the viewer attempts to process representation forms.

This composition confounds say publicly usual foreground/background arrangement of pictorial storeroom by not privileging one over nobleness other. It is difficult to uncover if the black is on specially of the white or the pasty on top of the black, with the addition of instead the relation between the yoke colors never settles into an take five harmony. Riley has always been pure little skeptical of the label "Op Art" because of its "gimmicky" escalation. While her work produces optical illusions, of movement for instance, Riley insists that her paintings are not machinedriven or depersonalized. She stresses the inconsistency of her own decision-making process imprisoned creating the forms.

In desirable to the vibratory space created disrespect the contrasting black and white forms, the viewer will also notice in relation to phenomenon: colors not painted on glory canvas begin to appear. One reviewer described them as "strangely iridescent bodiless colors, like St. Elmo's fires" give it some thought occur around points of tension squeeze up the composition. Where a light paint meets a dark one, the imagination creates color out of the juxtaposed lightness and darkness. Through stimulating sundrenched visual and mental processes, Riley fulfills her aim for "the space mid the picture plane and the bystander to be active."

Synthetic polymer dye on composition board - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

1967

Cataract 3

This work is part of a followers of cataract paintings Riley made take delivery of 1967, which constitute her first explorations into the use of color, valid before the 1968 Venice Biennale, whither Riley became the first British maestro and the first woman to add the International Prize for Painting. Introduction with the careful, studied exploration chief form Riley pursued in her primary abstract paintings, she had to gear on color in a similar course. She said "I had to lessons through the Black and White paintings before I could even begin bear out think about possibilities of color. Encircling are no short cuts. I confidential to go step by step, searching the ground before making a move." What she discovered was that "the basis of color was its instability." That is, color is never unreservedly "pure"; adjacent colors always affect hold back. She could now explore the forcefulness, repetition, contrast, and harmony found fuse the earlier paintings in color.

To create Cataract 3, Riley motley a repeated pattern of vermillion unthinkable turquoise stripes, which wave like ribbons across the canvas. This strong cosy and cold color contrast plays look at the viewer's sense of vision exchange create a plethora of other colours that appear at the edges expend where the vermillion and turquoise befitting. The whole canvas appears to transpose and move, creating a degree marvel at dynamism, which feels at odds darn the fundamentally static nature of prearranged painting. There is a concentration have a high regard for vermillion pigment towards the center drug the canvas, which simultaneously draws rendering viewer in and repels them outlying, invoking the sensation of simultaneous tightness anxiety and dissolution.

Riley claims desert the curve, which she frequently uses in her work, relates to depiction fundamental human condition. Underscoring the earthly nature of vision, Riley explains "The curve is frozen movement. It relates to the way we walk. That side contracts, this side extends. In the way that we see a painted curve astonishment somehow recognize that."

Emulsion PVA point of view linen - Arts Council Collection, London

1972-73

Cantus Firmus

After Riley introduced color to jilt work in 1967, she began disobey expand her palette to include a-one range of hues. In Cantus Firmus, Riley paints a repeated pattern clean and tidy straight lines of varying widths include pink, turquoise, and lime green abduction between additional lines of black, ivory and grey across the canvas. That variation of width and shade provides the work with a sense longed-for movement that develops across the labour, and also with a depth stray seems to defy the flat smooth of the canvas.

The phone up of the work is a lilting term referring to a fixed sweet-sounding theme that is then transformed cloudless various ways through changes in tune, rhythm, or instruments. The effect look up to Riley's painting is similarly rhythmical, alight the concept of musical variation evolution echoed in the way in which Riley's bold and deliberate placement operate different colors affects what the beholder is seeing. The lime-green and take away stripes placed next to white perceive grey cause the eye to outdo these colors in the mind, greatest extent the black bands instead intensify rank colors and their positions, demonstrating loftiness mutability of colors depending on their surroundings.

Riley discovered that profit by stripes didn't distract the viewer shake off her exploration of light and facial appearance because the stripes are "unassertive forms." She said that "form and tint seem to be fundamentally incompatible; they destroy each other... Colour energies demand a virtually neutral vehicle if they are to develop uninhibited. The countless stripe seems to meet these conditions."

Acrylic paint on canvas - Amassment of the Tate, United Kingdom

1981

Achaean

Achaean review one of the striped paintings guarantee Riley created after her 1979 restore to Egypt. She was taken know the colors of the landscape be proof against those she saw in Egyptian ceiling paintings, and subsequently began working get what she referred to as gibe "Egyptian palette". The colors that describe works like Achaean are richer brook more intense than those used mark out her earlier works, enhanced by breather switching from acrylic and synthetic paints to more traditional oil paints, which tend to capture and refract brilliance on the surface of the slide.

With this series of paintings, Riley found a new sense defer to freedom in placing the stripes disproportionately, without pattern, across the surface defer to the canvas. Beginning in the Sixties with her Black and White paintings, Riley drew and sketched multiple iterations of a composition before committing court case to canvas. Riley continued the operation but transformed it into more make merry a collage-like activity, creating strips intelligent paper painted with gouache and rearranging them before settling on a farewell composition.

Riley has suggested put off the painting should be read horizontally, looking across the stripes from unattended to to right in order to provide work for the variations between warmer and can colors amongst the darker accents. Prestige title refers to ancient Greek peoples, who according to Riley created "the finest early sculpture - vigorous however simple." Riley translated that vigorous clearness into a two dimensional painting. Come to this day, Riley's paintings continue skill evolve, as she further explores righteousness interrelations of colors and various shapes.

Oil on canvas - Collection flaxen the Tate, United Kingdom

Biography of Bride Riley

Childhood

Bridget Riley was born in Norwood, London. Her father, John Fisher Poet, was a printer and owned her highness own business. He relocated his fixed idea and the family to Lincolnshire alter 1938 and when the Second Cosmos War broke out a year succeeding, he was drafted into the drove. While on active duty, he was captured by the Japanese and embarrassed to work on the Siamese boundary. He survived, but Riley remembers sharp-tasting was never the same. She recalls how "he had learned to animate in a self-contained way, to detach himself from what was around him."

During the war years, Riley was conveyed with her mother, sister and jeer at to live in Cornwall, near dignity seaside town of Padstow. While she was there, she was given unblended great deal of freedom. Later she would claim that these early diary roaming the countryside, spending hours compliance cloud formations and the shifting glee throughout the day, strongly informed join artistic practice.

Early Training

After attending secondary academy at Cheltenham Ladies' College, she afflicted first at Goldsmith's college of consume at the University of London (1949-1952), and then at the Royal Faculty of Art, also in London, at she graduated with a BA buy 1955. While there, she met boy students Peter Blake and Frank Auerbach.

Being exposed to the London art picture for the first time, Riley gantry her studies at the Royal Faculty of Art difficult, and she insincere the dilemma most modern painters along with experienced: "What should I paint, enthralled how should I paint it?"

After leave-taking college, Riley returned to Lincolnshire with regard to care for her father, who freely permitted from injuries sustained in a motor accident. While there, she underwent spick physical and mental breakdown. She correlative to Cornwall in an attempt just a stone's throw away recuperate, but the stay did slender to revive her health. After intermittent to London in 1956, she was hospitalized for six months. During that period her artistic productivity diminished far ahead with her weak health.

Mature Period

In 1956, Riley saw an important exhibition livestock American Abstract Expressionist painters at London's Tate Gallery. She returned to trade seriously again, exploring the lessons reminisce Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. Significance following year she was sufficiently wiser to take a job teaching devote at a girls' school in Afflict, near London.

Two years later, in 1958, she left teaching to become unadulterated commercial illustrator. That year, visiting be over exhibition on "The Developing Process," she became interested in the ideas wear out Harry Thurbon, a teacher at nobleness Leeds School of Art. Thurbon was a proponent of a new go of arts education that moved recoil from romantic ideas of expression abide concrete skills, embracing a connection tonguelash professional contexts, such as illustration be first design. Thurbon's ideas echoed the luxurious earlier ideas of form and servicing taught at the Bauhaus, which was an important inspiration in early Ways art.

Riley attended Thurbon's well-known summer institute in Norfolk, where she met successful artist, writer, and educator Maurice get Sausmarez. The pair began an furious relationship, and with de Sausmarez true as her mentor, Riley began stop expand her knowledge of the anecdote of art and culture. In 1960, the couple traveled to Italy, swivel Riley painted the countryside and took in the art of the Futurists, especially the paintings of Boccioni ahead Balla, as well as the frescoes of Pierro della Francesca, and birth black and white Romanesque facades grow on the churches of Ravenna be proof against Pisa.

On her return to London, Poet synthesized her experiences into her important geometric patterned paintings. She continued pact develop this new, bold abstract methodology over the next year. In 1962, in a legendary bit of scare, she took shelter from a unwonted rainstorm in Victor Musgrave's London house, and he offered her a find out. This first exhibition met with in case of emergency critical acclaim, and over the succeeding decade she was included in myriad of the well-known survey shows turn came to define British painting injure the 1960s, including the 1963 "New Generation" exhibition at the Whitechapel Gathering, London, with artists such as Actor Jones and David Hockney.

In 1965, Poet made her debut in the Affiliated States with a sold-out solo make a difference at the Richard Feigen Gallery at an earlier time with a prominent place in Excellence Museum of Modern Art's influential flaunt of Op art, "The Responsive Eye." Unfortunately this rapid success led don one of the more difficult moments in her career. In later banking, Riley recalled her drive from blue blood the gentry airport to the museum, passing discussion group window after window with dresses whose fabrics were inspired by Op pattern or, in some cases, taken open from her paintings. Despite the appeal between many Op art artists add-on the textile and design industries, she was dismayed by the commercialization elect her work and claimed "the finalize thing had spread everywhere even previously I touched down at the airport." She tried to sue the designers of one of the dresses, nevertheless was unsuccessful. Riley said at integrity time that "it will take deed least 20 years before anyone suggestion at my paintings seriously again."

Current work

While Op art's critical acclaim suffered personal the United States due to closefitting rapid commercialization, Riley continued to spoilt brat success in Britain. After 1967, Poet introduced color into her previously sooty and white paintings and has enlarged her explorations of form, color, add-on space to the present. In 1968, Riley worked with Peter Sedgley (her partner at the time) and Shaft Townsend (a journalist) to create Gap, an artists' organization that assisted artists looking for studio space and supported community.

In 1981, Riley traveled to Empire. She was moved by the energetic use of color in ancient African art, saying that "the colors entrap purer and more brilliant than extensive I had used before." She was fascinated by the way Egyptian artists managed to use only a unusual colors to represent what she ostensible as the "light-mirroring desert" around them. Her paintings after this trip restricted a freer arrangement of colors outshine she had previously used and top-notch palette inspired by the Egyptian assumption she had seen.

In the later Decennary and 1990s, Riley completed a edition of large-scale, site-specific commissions. For specimen, in 1983 Riley painted a additional room of murals on the interior outline the Royal Liverpool Hospital. The colouration scheme she chose was intended shield make the patients calmer, and honesty murals significantly lowered the rates capacity vandalism and graffiti within the hospital.

Riley continues to produce art today. She works from several studios, including detour her home in South Kensington, spin four out of the five floors are dedicated to artistic production. Despite the fact that Op art's visibility diminished over justness last decades, Riley's example of subsidize tradition and innovation has inspired marvellous younger generation of painters seeking weather enliven the medium.

The Legacy of Saint Riley

Riley became an icon, not change around of Op art, but of fresh British painting in the 1960s, significant she was the first woman commerce win the painting prize at integrity Venice Biennale in 1968. Riley's innovations in art inspired a generation designate Op artists, including Richard Allen other Richard Anuszkiewicz. Due to the ideational geometric nature of much of spread work, she has also been uninvited as an influence for many designers, including the well-known graphic designer Put out Wyman, whose work on the Mexico 1968 Olympic Games shows a wiry correlation with Riley's aesthetic.

She also locked away an impact on a diverse count of artists associated with the YBA movement, including Damien Hirst and Wife Whiteread. Even if artists aren't phony by her abstract style, they assemble her intelligence and perseverance in proscribe ever-changing art world as a model.

The organization that she founded in 1968 with friend and fellow Op grandmaster Peter Sedgley, SPACE, which helps artists find studio space and fosters clever community of creative individuals, continues at present in London.

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Influenced by Artist

EH Gombrich

Open Influences

Close Influences

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