Bridget Riley British, b. 1931

For over a decade Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert has fostered a close relationship with the pioneering British artist Bridget Riley (b. 1931), curating several influential exhibitions of her early work including Bridget Riley: Works 1960-1966 (2012), Bridget Riley: Uneasy Centre and Related Studies (2016) and The Responsive Eye: Paintings and Studies 1961–1966 (2025). In 2023 the gallery helped to organise her first major touring show in America, Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio, which travelled to The Art Institute of Chicago, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Morgan Library, New York.

Riley has devoted her entire career to exploring the perceptual effects of geometric abstraction. Since 1961, she has focused on simple, yet fundamental forms—lines, curves, circles, and squares—composed according to a precise internal logic on canvas, paper, or walls. These arrangements are designed to engage the viewer’s visual perception, often inducing sensations of movement and vibration.

Riley’s early black-and-white works laid the foundation for this unique formal vocabulary, creating vivid perceptual experiences through cycles of shape and pattern. In 1967, she expanded her practice by introducing colour, deepening the viewer’s interaction with her work. Her distinct approach to modernism, using what she refers to as the ‘basic means of painting,’ positions her as one of the most independent voices in British art.

Although born in London, it was Riley’s childhood in Cornwall that cultivated her acute interest in how and what we see. In The Pleasures of Sight (1984) she recalled, ‘what I experienced there formed the basis of my visual life’–the sensations and impressions of the shifting Cornish light, varied colours, and topography. From 1949 to 1952 Riley studied at Goldsmiths College, where under the guidance of Samuel Rabin (1903-1991) she honed her life drawing skills, grounding her practice in the principles of pictorial abstraction and rigorous observation. Following three years at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955, it was in the late autumn of 1959 that Riley made her defining copy of Georges Seurat’s Le Pont de Courbevoie (1886-87) from a reproduction. This experience marked a decisive breakthrough in her understanding of colour and perception, emboldening the artist to pursue works of pure abstraction.

Riley’s first independent body of work was produced in 1960–hard-edge abstractionist paintings in black and white, mostly using squares, circles and parallel lines as pictorial units, composed to induce a stimulating visual energy. The first solo exhibition of these works at Gallery One, London, in 1962 was a resounding success, and Riley’s second in 1963 came with international acclaim. Curator William Seitz visited the artist to discuss the role of perception in painting and later included her work in The Responsive Eye (1965), an international survey of what Seitz described as ‘perceptual abstraction’ held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In a productive period of transition between 1965 and 1967 Riley introduced sequences of coloured greys to create pictures of exceptional subtlety such as the Arrest series (1965) and the Cataract group (1967)–a lengthy and cautious shift of intent that cleared the way for her sustained interest in the plastic properties of colour.

In Paean (1973), a major early colour painting, Riley approaches colour with increased boldness, with the interplay of red, blue, and green destabilising the painted hues. In Into Colour, Riley describes the work as a ‘powerful chant gathering momentum through assembling blocks of colour bands in an apparently random way’ (The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley, Collected Writings 1995-2009), capturing the essence of her evolving approach. Riley’s sophisticated process was internationally affirmed in 1968, when she represented Great Britain at the 34th Venice Biennale and became the first living British artist to win the prestigious International Prize for Painting. Her first retrospective, covering the years 1961 to 1970, debuted at Kunstverein Hannover in 1971 and toured prominent European galleries.

Travelling with Robert Kudielka fuelled her engagement with the European tradition, inspiring a body of subtle and luminous curved paintings between 1974 and 1978. A transformative journey to Egypt in the late 1970s sparked a fascination with the colour palette of ancient Egyptian art, recalled upon her return to London. The intensity of the colours necessitated a decisive transition from acrylic to oil paints, and a return to the simpler stripe motif. These ‘Egyptian stripes’ would occupy the artist for the next five years.

This period heralded the advent of the Rhomboid series, where diagonal hatching disrupts the verticality of the stripes and brings forth a field of rhomboid planes–a shift first traced in Gentle Edge (1986). By the early 1990s, Riley had developed a vast and highly selective palette of nearly one hundred colours, a range from which she would derive ‘colour brackets’ for each painting, akin to a musician selecting a key (Robert Kudielka, 1991). This led to works such as High Sky (1991) and Nataraja (1993), which, through their rich colour structure, created an even more fluid pictorial space, eventually leading to the reintegration of curves in the Lagoon group (1997). Riley continues to make fresh encounters with motifs that have long held a place in her oeuvre. The presence of past work in her studio opens the door to new fields of pictorial discovery, as she steadily unfolds the potential inherent in her medium to push the boundaries of perception.

In 1974, Riley was named a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) and in 1999, appointed the Companion of Honour. In 2003, the artist was awarded the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo. She received the Kaiser Ring of the City of Goslar, Germany, in 2009 and the Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen, Germany, in 2012. Recent significant solo presentations include those at Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2000-2001); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2004-2005); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2008); National Gallery, London (2010-2011); Art Institute of Chicago (2014-2015); The Courtauld Gallery, London (2015); Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, Sakura, Japan (2018); and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut (2022).