Bridget Riley
The queen of Op Art.
Bridget Riley paints black-and-white and coloured patterns that seem to move and vibrate before the eye.
Bridget Riley was born in 1931 in London and spent much of her childhood in Cornwall, where the light and the sea made a strong impression on her. She studied at Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art in London. During the 1950s she felt her way forward, partly by studying how the pointillist Georges Seurat built up his pictures from dots of colour.
Around 1961 she began painting black-and-white pictures of geometric patterns, squares, circles and wavy lines that seem to move, flicker and bend as one looks at them. Fall of 1963, a surface of wavy black lines, is in the Tate in London. Her art is called Op Art, optical art, because it plays on the way the eye and brain perceive forms.
In 1965 she took part in the major exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and became internationally famous. At the same time the fashion industry and advertising began copying her patterns, which she felt cheapened her art. From the late 1960s she began working with colour, often in stripes and bands, and a trip to Egypt around 1980 gave her a new palette.
In 1968 she became the first woman to win the Venice Biennale’s International Prize for painting. She has since continued to explore the interplay of form and colour, including in large wall paintings, and has had major retrospectives in Europe and the United States.
Riley is regarded as one of the foremost British artists of the post-war era. Her art shows that an abstract picture is not just something one looks at, but something that happens in the viewer’s eye.