British Vogue - 08.2019

I

n 1949, 18-year-old Bridget Riley

went to study art at Goldsmiths’

College wearing corduroy trousers

and a man’s shirt. This tells us two

things: first, that the great British artist

has never cared for what people thought;

second, she’s always had a determined

style, in her life as in her work.

This year, Riley, now 88, is celebrated

in a huge career retrospective, showing

initially in Edinburgh, then in London.

It charts her evolution from a hesitant

figurative artist in the 1950s into the high

priestess of Op Art, that eye-spinning

genre so easily associated with the

Swinging ’60s; then later, her rejection

of that label to become one of the grandes

dames of international art. We move from

the monochrome Movement in Squares,

1961, both severe and slightly trippy, to

2012’s majestic Rajasthan, all glowing,

fractured curves in orange, turquoise, grey

and red. Over 60 years, she has forced us

to look again, and to look better, to gauge

all the weird and lovely things that shades

and shapes can do.

Riley has called painting a “wonderful

discipline”, and it is true there is rigour

in her shimmering, pulsating canvases,

which depend on the relentless, often

repetitive interaction of curves or stripes.

She is notoriously meticulous in her

approach, and notoriously reluctant to

discuss it. There is archive footage,

recently uploaded to YouTube, of her

trying to analyse her process in the

1960s: “Can we stop,” she says in her

clipped RP tones, frustrated by how

little her explanations can do.

In fact, Riley is excellent at discussing

art: she has written about it extensively,

about influences such as the pointillist

Georges Seurat, Futurism and Monet.

But her true inspiration lies beyond

LOOK AGA I N

Half a century on from Op Art, Bridget Riley is still

finding new ways to explore perception, as her major

retrospective triumphantly reveals. By Louis Wise

Above, from

top: Aria

(2012);

Rajasthan

(2012). Left:

Movement in

Squares (1961)

words – in the long walks she took as a

child with her mother and sister in

Cornwall, observing the effects of light

on the land and sea; in wandering

through the south of France on a hot

summer’s day, feeling like she was “in a

field of pure energy”. This is the sensation

her greatest pictures give. And, as she

approaches 90, her pictures just get

bigger and bigger, covering whole walls

• such as Messengers, unveiled earlier
  this year at the National Gallery. Her
  retrospective may ask us to look back,
  but she’s still telling us to keep up. n
  Bridget Riley is at the Scottish National
  Gallery, Edinburgh, until 22 September,
  and at Hayward Gallery, London SE1,
  from 22 October

Her true

inspiration

lies beyond

words – in

observing

the effects of

light on the

land and sea

Left: Bridget

Riley by Colin

Dodgson, Vogue,

January 2018

BRIDGET RILEY; BRIDGET RILEY AND DAVID ZWIRNER

A R TS & C U LT U R E

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