Bridget Riley
The screenprints are colour-critical to an unusual degree, and fading is the fault owners never see coming.
Riley made a series of black-and-white paintings in the early 1960s — chevrons, discs, waves, curved lines — that produce genuine physical sensations of instability in the viewer. Their appearance in The Responsive Eye in New York in 1965 caused the imagery to be pirated onto dresses and packaging within weeks, which she fought and lost, and which coloured her relationship with the market for years afterwards. Colour entered the work from 1967 and has occupied her since, through stripes, twisted curves and lozenges. The canvases are executed by assistants to her specification, which she has never concealed and which is central to how the work is made rather than a delegation of it.
Precision is the whole proposition, and that has direct consequences for value. These paintings depend on absolutely clean edges and flat, unmodulated surfaces; there is nothing for a retouch to hide behind. Any repaint, edge wear, stretcher distortion or surface abrasion is immediately visible and reduces value more sharply than the equivalent damage would on a gestural painting. Many are acrylic on linen or on board with no varnish, and they cannot be surface-cleaned conventionally.
The screenprints, published from the 1960s onwards in editions typically between seventy-five and one hundred and fifty, are what most owners hold and are a serious body of work in their own right. They are also acutely colour-critical: the whole optical effect depends on precise relationships between adjacent colours, so a sheet that has faded even slightly has lost the thing it was made to do. Two impressions of the same edition, one kept in a folder and one hung in a south-facing room, are not the same object commercially.
Preparatory gouaches and studies are unique and sought, and they are the part of the output that shows the working — the colour trials, the shifts of interval. Provenance is generally well documented through her galleries, and the artist has been notably active in the scholarship on her own work, which makes the record unusually clear for a living artist of her standing.
Selling a work
We represent the seller rather than the auction house: comparing houses and sale dates, negotiating the seller's terms, and keeping the paperwork and remittance in your name. What sets the value of a Bridget Riley sets out what we look at first.