Bridget Riley
Made black-and-white paintings that move when you look at them, and then let colour in.
Bridget Riley was born in London in 1931 and spent the war in Cornwall. After a period copying Seurat, she made in the early 1960s a series of black-and-white paintings — chevrons, discs, waves, curved lines — that produce genuine physical sensations of movement and 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 almost immediately, which she fought and lost. Colour entered from 1967 and has occupied her since, in stripes, twisted curves and lozenges. She works with assistants who execute the canvases to her specification.
Precision is the market. Riley's paintings depend on absolutely clean edges and flat unmodulated surfaces, and any retouching, scuff or unevenness is immediately visible and materially reduces value; the works are also frequently on board or acrylic on linen with no varnish and cannot be cleaned conventionally. The screenprints, published from the 1960s onwards in editions of around seventy-five to a hundred and fifty, are a major body of work and are colour-critical — fading is the commonest fault. Studies and preparatory gouaches are unique.
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