Bridget Riley: Flashback
Text by Michael Bracewell, Robert Kudielka, and Bridget Riley
Bridget Riley is that rare instance of an artist whose work breaks free of art history and merges with the broader cultural imagination, yet preserves for itself a rigorous, focused dialogue with painting’s most basic properties: the interaction of form and color. Produced in close collaboration with the artist, Flashback tracks Bridget Riley’s career from its sensational beginnings in the early 1960s, at the helm of Op art, to the ambitious and powerful paintings and works on paper of recent years. Alongside a wealth of reproductions of works from 1961 to 2007, it also features an illustrated chronology and list of works in U.K. public collections, an essay by Michael Bracewell, and a wonderful meditation by Riley, titled “Work,” in which she looks back on the curve of her art across the decades. “You cannot deal with thought directly outside practice as a painter,” she writes: “‘doing’ is essential in order to find out what form your thought takes.” Flashback reveals Riley’s achievement in all its energetic glory, surveyable in one concise volume.
Publisher: Hayward Publishing
Artists: Bridget Riley
Contributors: Michael Bracewell, Robert Kudielka, Bridget Riley
Publication Date: 2010
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 8 3/4 x 10 1/2 in (22.3 x 26.7 cm)
Pages: 96
Reproductions: 74 color, 10 b&w
ISBN: 9781853322808
Retail: $35 US & Canada | £20 | €23
Status: Available
Bridget Riley
One of the most significant artists working today, Bridget Riley’s dedication to the interaction of form and color has led to a continued exploration of perception. From the early 1960s, she has used elementary shapes such as lines, circles, curves, and squares to create visual experiences that actively engage the viewer, at times triggering optical sensations of vibration and movement. Her earliest black-and-white compositions offer impressions of several other pigments, while ensuing, multi-chromatic works present color as an active component. Although abstract, her practice is closely linked with nature, which she understands to be “the dynamism of visual forces—an event rather than an appearance.”
Robert Kudielka
Robert Kudielka is an art historian and former Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the University of the Arts, Berlin. He is the co-author with Bridget Riley of Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation, Works, 1914-1940 (2002) and author and editor of numerous books on Riley, including Robert Kudielka on Bridget Riley: Essays and interviews since 1972 (2005; revised and expanded edition, 2014) and The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley, Collected Writings 1965-2009 (2009).