Bridget Riley

A founder of the op-art movement — where artists distorted the physiology and psychology of perception through the use of colour and geometry — Bridget Riley’s dynamic paintings and prints engage viewers through the illusionary vibration and movement of static forms. Coming from a background in pointillism, Riley’s early works focused on creating dynamism through limited shapes and colours, using only black and white until 1967, resulting in a bold visual vocabulary which has carried through her career as an artist. Integrating colour into her oeuvre after experiencing the vibrant visual cultures in Egypt, her paintings created over the last half a century have explored the rich potential of contrast and colour theory in creating optical phenomena.

Riley, born in London in 1931, graduated from Goldsmiths’ College in 1952 before completing a degree at Royal College of Art in 1955. Riley has been awarded the AICA Critics Prize, the John Moores’ Liverpool Open Section prize, and an International Painting Prize at the Venice Biennale, among others. Exhibitions of her work have been held in several international galleries and museums, such as the Yale Center for British Art (USA), Tate Modern (UK), National Galleries of Scotland (UK), Hayward Gallery (UK), The Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art (Japan), the National Gallery (UK), and the Museum of Modern Art (USA), among others. Her works is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, AUS), Kunstmuseum (Bern, Switzerland), Nationalgalerie (Berlin, Germany), the National Gallery of Modern Art (Tokyo, Japan), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Museu Colecção Berardo (Lisbon, Portugal), Tate (London, UK), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, USA), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA) among others.