Patchwork & Quilting UK – July 2019

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FEATURE // making ripples, making waves

15 June – 22 September 2019 Bridget Riley at the Scottish National Gallery, Princes St, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL For more information visit http://www.nationalgalleries.org

23 October 2019 – 26 January 2020 Bridget Riley at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, SE1 For more information visit http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk

metaphor for some of her abstractions. Riley went on to study painting at Goldsmiths College (1949 – 1952) and the Royal College of Art (1952 – 1955).

At the launch of ‘Messengers’, Riley describes how she used to visit the National Gallery collections as a young student and fell under the spell of the work of the French painter Georges Seurat, particularly the quality of light he achieved in his Pointillist composition, ‘Bathers at Asnières’. For a while, Riley experimented with tiny dots of colour to build shimmering landscapes. Riley is better known for her canvases of black undulating lines and hard geometric patterns that came to encapsulate the ebullient mood of the Sixties, alongside Mary

Quant dresses and Vidal Sassoon precision hair-cutting. Ever since, her career has been fabulously successful and decorated.

In 2019, Riley has exhibitions at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh and the Hayward Gallery, London, which present a survey of over seventy years of practice with an emphasis on pivotal moments in her career. On display are two monochrome abstractions that were executed fi fty four years apart and which demonstrate that there is nothing arbitrary in Riley’s art. The more recent ‘Cascando’ (2015) is a horizontal tessellation of interlocking black and white equilateral triangles, 15 rows long, 45 rows wide. A repeating pattern of these shapes creates bold diagonals, but Riley has introduced a third element: at odd intervals a black or white triangle might bulge to the left or right. It is as if they are infected or diseased and their inclusion gives an impression of falling or cascading. ‘Movement in Squares’ (1961) is a chequerboard canvas of black and white squares that gradually narrow to stripes and collapse into a fold to the right of centre. Where this happens, the stripes look tonally paler and the surface fractured, almost a refl ection in water or a ribbon running down a screen like the static of an analogue television set.

Bridget Riley is one of several extraordinarily long-lived female artists who are still engaging the art world twenty years after most of us have retired. Rose Wylie, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Bourgeois (now deceased) and many others are being shown in galleries around the globe and their presence readjusts the gender balance previously weighted in favour of male painters. Riley’s painted wavy lines keep her connected to the world, at any rate, they are what she hopes for us: ‘You make the work come alive by looking and I hope you feel alive’; that is her message.

Patchwork & Quilting UK – July 2019

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