Major show of works by Op artist Bridget Riley to open at Liverpool Walker

Sep 18 2009 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

THE smallest observation can set Bridget Riley off on a train of thought that could ultimately end up as a painting.

Last week it was the effect of sunlight landing on the trees outside her London studio.

“She just stopped mid-sentence and said ‘look at that’ because the way that light hits something can make it look utterly different,” recalls the Arts Council’s head of collections Caroline Douglas, who has been working closely with Riley to prepare a major exhibition of her work.

The show, featuring eight large- scale paintings and around 30 drawings, many that have never before been on public display, is touring UK galleries, starting with The Walker.

The striking black and white geometric work, Movement in Squares, is included in the exhibition and was purchased by the Arts Council a year after its creation in 1961.

Two years later, she was awarded the Walker’s prestigious John Moores Prize, and by the end of the decade her name would be synonymous with the Op Art movement – a radical group whose members created optical illusions on canvas and in sculpture.

In Riley’s piece, the rectangles become narrower as they approach the centre of piece, so that it appears to open out from a crease at the centre like the pages of a book.

“The early black and white paintings – people very flippantly said they made you feel seasick because they have a more physical effect on you,” says Douglas.

“I don’t think Bridget ever intended that at all.”

Nor did she intend the blatant commercialisation of Op Art, which upset her so greatly that she pulled away from the movement.

Her later colourful works are just as dramatic. The exhibition includes the striped Study using Green, Red, Blue, Yellow and Black (1982) and  Collage Study (1993) – a jigsaw puzzle of tesselated shapes.

“Her work is an investigation of colour and how colours react against each other,” explains the curator.

“It’s very much about the sensation of looking.

“You have to slow down in order to really look at the paintings and see what’s going on in them.”

Although she has become known for her abstract style, Riley’s work is founded on a traditional art education at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art.