British artist Bridget Louise Riley is known as one of the foremost exponents of Op Art. Her work combines lines, colour arrangements and geometric precision to create engaging visual effects.
Riley’s extraordinary career continues unabated, despite the fact that the grand dame of Op Art is now in her 80s. Riley has achieved that elusive artistic ideal: creating a body of work as pioneering as it is ubiquitous. Her graphic style came to epitomise the ‘Swinging Sixties’ but her continued exploration of Op Art’s possibilities has proved it to be fertile ground. Despite focusing her work in a narrow field, she has managed to side-step the pitfalls of cliché.
Whilst the results of her painstaking technique and careful colour-play display a technical understanding firmly rooted in the scientific, Riley asserts that her approach has always been intuitive. Beyond the initial optical illusion, her art sets out to provoke an emotional response from the viewer.
She enjoyed a period of experimentation in the 1990s and early millennium. By this stage Riley had long abandoned the more rigid monochromatic structures associated with her 1960s output, discovering that the ‘lozenge’ forms endowed her juxtapositions of form and colour with more movement and depth than anything she had previously achieved. The nature of Riley’s work is to place demands on the viewer’s gaze but in these later works the calmer palette and the playful arabesque forms result in a series of works which are unequivocally fun and light-hearted to read.
Her works are currently held in the collections of MoMA in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate in London, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
