Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley, an English painter celebrated for her op art works, represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1968. There, she made history as the first British contemporary painter and the first woman to receive the International Prize for painting.

Biography of Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley was born in 1931 in London, UK. At the onset of World War II, Bridget Riley's father, a member of the Territorial Army, was mobilized. Riley, her mother, and her sister relocated to a cottage in Cornwall, where they lived with an aunt who had studied at Goldsmiths' College, London. During this time, Riley attended talks by various retired teachers and non-professionals. She later attended Cheltenham Ladies' College, studied art at Goldsmiths' College f, and continued her education at the Royal College of Art.

Between 1956 and 1959, she cared for her father after he was seriously injured in a car crash. Following this, she worked in a glassware shop before joining the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency as a part-time illustrator until 1962. The exhibition of Jackson Pollock's works at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1958 had a significant impact on her.

Her early work was figurative and semi-impressionist. Between 1958 and 1959, while working at the advertising agency, she began adopting a painting style based on the pointillist technique.

In 1959, Riley met painter and art educator Maurice de Sausmarez. He became her friend and mentor, encouraging her to explore Futurism, Divisionism, and artists like Klee and Seurat. Later, Riley and de Sausmarez entered into an intense romantic relationship, spending the summer of 1960 painting together in Italy. When the relationship ended in the autumn of the same year, Riley experienced a personal and artistic crisis. This period led her to create paintings that evolved into her black and white Op Art works. She began developing her signature Op Art style, characterized by black and white geometric patterns that explore visual dynamism and create a disorienting effect on the eye, producing movement and color.

In 1965, Riley participated in the group exhibition "The Responsive Eye" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This exhibition brought worldwide attention to the Op Art movement and showcased Riley's work, which featured black and white geometric patterns.

In 1967, she began exploring color, creating her first stripe painting that year. After a major retrospective in the early 1970s, she started traveling extensively. A trip to Egypt in the early 1980s, where she was inspired by the vibrant hieroglyphic decorations, led Riley to further investigate color and contrast in her work.

Her disciplined work was overshadowed by the bold gestures of the Neo-Expressionists in the 1980s. However, a 1999 exhibition of her early paintings at the Serpentine Gallery sparked a renewed interest in her optical experiments.

Riley was awarded the CBE and appointed a Companion of Honour in 1999. In 2003, she received the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo.

In 2003, Tate Britain organized a major retrospective of Bridget Riley's work. The David Zwirner Gallery and De La Warr Pavilion also presented retrospective shows in 2014 and 2015, respectively.

Recent shows featuring Riley's works include "Looking and Seeing, Doing and Making" at Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern (2022), "Bridget Riley Drawings" at Art Institute Chicago in Chicago (2022), "Perpetual Abstraction" at Yale Center for British Art in New Haven (2022), "Pleasures of Sight" at The Lightbox in Woking (2021), and "Bridget Riley: Prints 1962 - 2020" at Cristea Roberts Gallery in London (2020).