Courtesy Karsten Schubert, London, © Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley, "Déplacement/Shift" (1963). Emulsion on canvas panel, 30 x 30 in.

October 2008 Reviews

Manifesta 7

Jeff Koons

Chantal Akerman

Painting: Now and Forever, Part II

Erkka Nissinen

There is No There There

Elaine Duigenan

Kerry James Marshall

Peter Saul

John Massey

Pipilotti Rist

Thomas Helbig

Armando Andrade Tudela

Gary Hume

Marine Hugonnier

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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No matter how much Bridget Riley’s association— an admittedly reductive one—with the rapid commercialization of Op art in the 1960s still overshadows the lifelong achievement her work represents, the first half of this retrospective, packed with paintings from that decade, left me feeling restive. It was as if, at each instance, tiny hands were reaching out of the canvas to stir my eyeballs, like liquor-soaked olives in a martini glass. A few early pointillist landscapes situate Riley’s shift to overtly solicitous black, gray, and white “optical” canvases, including Tremor (1962), Shiver, and Burn (both 1964), in which repetitive triangular shapes form mind-bending depth-of-field mirages on the flat surface. Riley’s titles guide her viewers’ reactions, and this combined solicitousness cedes to a less-domineering form of seduction, and a welcome release of associations, when color is employed, as in the singing horizontal stripes of the ruby-rich Punjab (1971) or the subtler slashing diagonals of Byzantium (1969). Lest there be any doubt, works such as Lagoon 1 (1997) or Painting with Two Verticals 4 (2005) prove Riley’s range as a brilliant colorist: one who can articulate pale pastels or darker hard-candy tones into intricate configurations that make her abstraction a persuasive art of illusion.

"Bridget Riley" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.