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Bridget Riley, "Chant 2" (1967)

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Bridget Riley Bridget Riley Awarded Goslar Kaiser Ring U.K. Exhibition to Debut Recent Riley Works London Original Print Fair Postwar & Contemporary Art Iwona Blazwick on the New Whitechapel Silver Linings A Svelte Sale Yields Positive Results at Sotheby’s

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When Bridget Riley’s Chant 2  was last offered at auction—in a day sale at Christie’s New York in 1992—it sold for $33,000, under the low estimate. So its appearance in Sotheby’s evening sale, with this estimate, is a measure of the drastic reappraisal that her work has undergone.

Riley, known in art history books as an Op artist, is most famous for her black-and-white, optically challenging works of the 1960s, which became closely associated with Mary Quant designs and the fashion world. Indeed it is those jazzy two-tone examples that tend to command the highest prices: In June 2006, Diagonal Curve, 1966, became the first Riley to bring more than six figures, when it sold to an American collector at Sotheby’s London for £1.2 million ($2.1 million), and last February, Static 2, another black-and-white work from the same year, went for a record £1.5 million ($3 million) at Christie’s London. According to the London dealer Karsten Schubert, a similar painting recently fetched $3.4 million on the private market.

Despite the strong performance of her black-and-white works, Riley is increasingly being appreciated as a colorist. In May 2007 at the Munich auctioneer Neumeister, the artist’s Byzantium, a large colored-stripe painting from 1969, sold to a Greek collector for €1.3 million ($1.7 million); in its last appearance at auction, at Christie’s London in 1987, it had brought just £14,300 ($23,700). Because Chant 2  is from Riley’s first series of colored paintings, it is arguably a more important work. It also has a notable provenance: the Hoh Collection, in Fürth, Germany. And it has been guaranteed—a sign of hot competition with Christie’s, which will offer other works from the same collection at its Impressionist and modern art sale this month.

"London Sales Preview" originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's June 2008 Table of Contents.