Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Hong Kong

Literature:

Schubert 52.

Note:

One of the most important artists to explore the behaviours of colour and form, Riley’s work expands the boundaries of perception in art. Reviewing a show of the artist’s work in 2019, Adrian Searle writes that “Riley’s art is as sneaky as it is spectacular. Some of her paintings make you want to fall over and some make you feel like you’re fainting, your eyes ping-ponging all over the place. Others are more stately in their visual rhythms, but the experience of a Riley is never static. The eye roams and the brain roams with it.”

Born in London, Riley spent much of her childhood in Cornwall, a seaside landscape which would influence her observations of light and terrain. She studied at Goldsmiths’ College and the Royal College of Art. An artist in search of a style, Riley experimented with several movements which had experimented with colour, including Impressionism and pointillism. She painted figures and landscapes while working as a teacher of art and at an advertising agency. After years of exploration, she began to explore geometry, abstraction and disorienting optical phenomena, through a genre known as Op Art.

Riley’s great breakthrough came in 1965 with a 1965 group exhibition, “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The show introduced the public to Op Art, and was to spawn imitators in fashion and design. So popular was the exhibition and Riley’s style that its vocabulary was quickly co-opted into the psychedelic 60s aesthetic. Upset, Riley felt the need to explain her work in an editorial in ARTnews magazine: “‘The Responsive Eye’ was a serious exhibition, but its qualities were obscured by an explosion of commercialism, bandwagoning and hysterical sensationalism. Most people were so busy taking sides, and arguing about what had or had not happened, that they could no longer see what was actually on the wall.” Regardless, what had been made clear was that Riley was an artist on the rise. Three years later she would represent Britain at the 1968 Venice Biennale, where she received the international prize for painting – the first woman to ever receive the award.

Though rising to fame with her black and white paintings, Riley’s career can be characterised by its deep and art historical exploration of chromatics, and the often disorienting relationships between colours and the spaces between them. Stripes, curves, lines, waves, circles, triangular and rhomboid forms were all used by the artist to create immersive visual experiences which produce emotional and physical responses. Of her work, Riley explained: “I am sometimes asked – “What is your objective” – and this I cannot truthfully answer… I work “from” something rather than “towards” something. It is a process of discovery.”