Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley (born 1931) is a British painter and one of the central figures of Op Art, the movement that emerged in the early 1960s. She studied at Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art in London, and by the early 1960s had left representational painting behind for precise, repeating geometric structures: lines, curves, and later grids of shapes and colour, arranged so that a still painting seems to shimmer, ripple or move as you look at it.

Black, white and movement without motion

Her breakthrough works were in black and white. In Movement in Squares (1961), a chequerboard's columns narrow towards the middle, so the flat surface seems to fold away into a crease. Fall (1963), now in the Tate, is made of a single wavy line repeated down the canvas, with the waves tightening towards the bottom; looking at it, many people see the surface ripple and flicker, especially at the edges of their vision.

There is no actual motion, animation or depth in these paintings, only flat paint, yet the effects are related to several illusions on this site. The flicker in densely repeated high-contrast lines connects her work to the peripheral drift illusion and to the edge interactions behind the café wall. The way a pattern's structure can make some areas look greyer or brighter than they are echoes the Hermann grid.

Fame, and frustration

Her work was shown in The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965, the exhibition that launched Op Art internationally (Seitz, 1965). The fame came with a price: her patterns were quickly copied by the fashion and advertising industries, usually without permission, which she found deeply frustrating. In 1968 she won the International Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale, the first woman to do so.

From the mid-1960s she worked increasingly in colour, with stripes and later curving bands in which neighbouring colours seem to change each other. That's the same simultaneous contrast that makes one grey look different on different backgrounds, put to work on a large scale.

Perception as subject

What sets Riley apart is how deliberate it all is. Her paintings are developed through many preparatory studies that test spacing, curvature and tone before the final work is made, often with studio assistants, at a scale and precision that make the effect strong and reliable. In her own writing she describes perception itself as her subject: the instability you feel in front of a painting is the point of the work, not a side effect (Riley, 1999). Her paintings show that an artist working by eye can find and use the same features of vision that psychologists study, and that "illusion" and "art" can be the same thing seen from two sides.