Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley's art delves into the exploration of perception, colour relationships, and the intricacies of human vision.

In the 1960s, Bridget Riley pioneered op art, establishing an organized and non-figurative visual language that employs optical and perspectival effects to convey nature, emotions, and human sensations.

This highly influential artist's profound impact is evident through major retrospectives held at renowned institutions like Tate Britain in 2003 and the Hayward Gallery in 2019.

Discover our captivating collection of Bridget Riley paintings and prints to experience the mesmerizing world of this exceptional artist.

Bridget Riley Biography

Born in South London in 1931, Bridget Riley’s practice extends across painting and
printmaking in which she explores perception, colour relationships, and the
way in which we see.

Riley began her technical training at
Goldsmith’s College in 1949, later enrolling at the Royal College of Art in
1955.

Early in her career, Riley was profoundly affected by
the work of Jackson Pollock whose Abstract Expressionist canvases she viewed
at an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1958, and Georges
Seurat.

Struggling with her artistic identity, Riley
considered giving up art altogether until she painted The Kiss, 1961, a
reductive composition showing two black forms on the verge of
‘kissing’.

In that moment, Riley established her artistic
identity, founding an ordered, non-figurative visual language that utilises
optical and perspectival effects to convey nature, emotion and human
sensation.

Riley’s earliest works in the 1960s remained
monochromatic, before she started exploring the effects of colour in various
formats: ‘stripes’ (1967-73), ‘curves’ (1974-80), ‘fragments’ (1988-92).
Riley continues to revisit these formats in different iterations,
simultaneously producing a comprehensive body of graphic
work.

Riley was included in the 1965 exhibition, The
Responsive Eye, at MoMA, New York, and later became the first female artist
to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1968, also becoming the
first woman to win the International Prize for
Painting.

Riley was the subject of major retrospectives at
Tate Britain in 2003 and most recently at the Hayward Gallery in
2019.

One of Riley’s earliest black-and-white works,
Untitled (Diagonal Curve), 1966, holds the current auction record of her
work, which stands at £4.34 million.