Celebrated Op Art artist, Bridget Riley, surrounded by her work.
Bridget Riley is practically synonymous with the Op Art movement which developed in the late 1950s and ‘60s. Her striking paintings often appear deceptively simple on the surface, but they are meticulously planned to create mesmerising effects and optical illusions.
Over her 70-year career, Bridget Riley has firmly established herself as an important contemporary artist. Her work commands substantial sums, and her prints (which account for nearly 80% of her work sold at auction) generally fetch between £1,000 and £5,000, with some attaining even higher prices.
Despite being such a respected artist, fairly little is known about Bridget Riley’s personal life, and she rarely gives interviews. Nevertheless, some facts can be gleaned: below are seven things you might not have known about Bridget Riley.
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Her Style Developed From Post-Impressionism
Though Riley is famous for her captivating Op Art paintings, she only developed this style in the early 1960s. Before that, she experimented with Pointillism, the practice of applying small, distinct dots of colour which together form an image. Riley was particularly inspired by the French Neo-Impressionist, Georges Seurat, who developed Pointillism, and she studied and analysed his technique in depth, even going as far as to copy his painting, The Bridge at Courbvoie.
Riley has always been open about Seurat’s influence on her, stating: “I learned from Seurat this important thing about colour and light, that ‘a light’ can be built from colour. I learned a great deal about interaction.” Combined with a difficult time in her personal life – following a series of emotional crises which precipitated a breakdown – Riley’s study of Pointillism would lead her to develop her signature geometric, Op Art style for which she is now remembered.
Her Most Expensive Print Sold For £65,000
Bridget Riley’s Untitled (Oval Image) from 1964 is exemplary of the geometric, monochromatic work she created throughout most of the 1960s, and it was sold by Phillips in June 2024 for £65,000. Much of Riley’s work – including this print – explores the way people perceive things, and she has said in the past that: “looking is, I feel, a vital aspect of existence. Perception constitutes our awareness of what it is to be human, indeed what it is to be alive.”
Untitled (Oval Image) Sold by Phillips in 2024
She Used To Work Solely In Monochrome
During the formative years of her career, Bridget Riley worked almost exclusively in black and white, sometimes bringing in shades of grey. These pieces were – and remain – very striking, and images such as Untitled (Oval Image), Untitled (Based on Blaze) and ones from the Fragments series (all of which were executed in black and white) are amongst the artist’s most sought after prints on the market today.
Nevertheless, when she introduced colour to her paintings in 1967, she opened up a whole new dimension to her artwork. Her exploration of tone and hue using bands of colour brought a freshness and an energy to her pieces, many of which – such as Firebird and Ra (Inverted) – are now highly-sought after Riley prints.
She Was Inspired By Her Childhood Surroundings
During the Second World War, Bridget Riley, her mother, her sister, and her aunt all moved into a cottage in Cornwall together to escape the danger of London. This had a profound effect on the young Bridget Riley, who later said: “There was in fact nothing to do but look and enjoy and appreciate and move around in this extraordinarily beautiful landscape” which contained a “mixture of all colours that you could perceive.”
London during the Blitz
And By Her Travels As An Adult
In 1960, Riley spent a summer travelling through Italy and painting with her then-partner Maurice de Sausmarez, during which time she developed her studies of Pointillism. She also went to Egypt in the early 1980s, and this led her to develop her colour palette so that it included a stunning range of warm colours and vibrant tones, which she used to create two of her best-known series, Ka and Ra. She later returned to Ra, creating a 2009 edition of prints titled Ra (Inverted), one of which was sold by Christie’s in September 2023 for £35,000.
Bridget Riley’s Assistants Do The Painting
Since 1961, Bridget Riley has employed a team of assistants to paint for her. The artist herself spends a lot of time carefully planning the final designs and creating studies, some of which become a series in their own right, such as her popular Fragments prints.
She stated her assistants “help me establish distance. The way I work means I am, inevitably, my own spectator. Since the spectator who looks at my work is part of the work itself, it helps very greatly to be as objective as I possibly can.”
She Got Her Debut Exhibition By Chance
In 1961, Bridget Riley was walking home one day when it started pouring with torrential rain. She took shelter inside a nearby doorway, which turned out to be Gallery One, a small, influential, avant-garde gallery run by Victor Musgrave, the British poet and art dealer.
Musgrave and Riley got talking – she later said “I gave him a very stiff review of what I saw” – and the encounter was to prove fortuitous; she showed him some of her own work, and the following year, he hosted her first solo show at the gallery. It was an event which launched Riley’s career as one of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
An advertisement for Bridget Riley’s exhibition at Gallery One
