Bridget Riley: Edge of light
Bridget Riley (b 1931)
Edge of light
1981 – 2003
Colour screenprint – Edition no. 57/85
105 x 90 cm
Signed and dated bottom right
Sold - 2013
ILLUSTRATED
Karsten Schubert, Bridget Riley: Complete Prints , London, 2010, No. 55
The British painter Bridget Riley’s distinctive, optically vibrant paintings produced in the 1960s and ‘70s have become a hallmark of the period’s Optical Art movement. Hilarie M. Sheets writes in Art + Auction: Riley’s black-and-white paintings of the early 1960s, in which space seems to advance and buckle, thanks to her careful calibration of repeated shapes, placed the young artist in the vanguard of Op art. She catapulted to international art stardom in the mid 1960s when New York’s Museum of Modern Art included her alongside such talents as Josef Albers and Ellsworth Kelly in its 1965 exhibition “The Responsive Eye” and the fashion designer (and museum founder) Larry Aldrich printed knockoffs of her images on fabric for a popular dress collection. Later in the decade Riley shifted to nuanced colour, and in 1968, with three monumental striped canvases that seem to radiate light, she was the first woman and first contemporary British artist to win the international painting prize at the Venice Biennale. In the 1970s she gained widespread respect with her studied approach to the perceptual relationships between colours .
By exploring optical phenomena, Riley juxtaposes lines of complementary, pure colours, which has an effect on the perceived brightness of each individual colour. While stressing the importance of clarity of colour, order of mind…no gratuitous brushwork , Riley also recognizes the relationship between music and painting, as did artists such as Kandinsky, commenting: The eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. One moment, there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events .
Riley’s disciplined work triggered a resurgence of interest in her optical experiments with a show of pictures from her heyday at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 1999. In 2000 she was reintroduced to the New York art world with simultaneous exhibitions at the Dia Art Center and PaceWildenstein, and in 2003 the Tate Britain organized a major Riley retrospective.
One of the first artists to explore screen printing as a medium in the early 1960’s, Riley was excited about trying new materials during an era when artists wanted to create a brave new world. In 1981, she once again turned to the screenprint to make a very particular statement that could only be made in that medium; she explains:
In the 1980s, I only managed to do two prints. I felt them crucial to make, because they were fundamental to my argument about colour relationships: that the same colours related in different ways could give a different range of effects .
Lynn MacRitchie elaborates in Bridget Riley: Complete Prints: The two prints, Ra 2 and Silvered 2, the largest she had yet made, are composed in the colours of what has come to be called her ‘Egyptian’ palette, based on colours she had first seen during a visit there in 1979 and which she first used in her paintings of 1981-84. And there, at the left of the lower margin of each of the prints, she has listed them in a pencil note thus :
21 Reds
21 Blues
24 Turquoises
24 Yellows
9 Blacks
8 Whites
The colours named under each print are the same, but the effect of their different arrangement in the images above clearly is not. Ra 2 begins with blue at the left, but soon blossoms into warm reds and yellows clustered left of centre, cooling gradually back to blue at the right. In Silvered 2, the colours are paced evenly across the whole surface, which seems to shimmer in a pool of silvery light. The contrast is startling. But to spell out the means by which it was achieved is something unique in Riley’s work.
She herself describes it as ‘the closest I’ve come to Conceptual art – the paintings weren’t about making that point but the prints were… ’
The large scale silkscreens, ‘Edge of Light’ and ‘Ra (Inverted)’, although produced much later in 2003 and 2009 respectively, are further explorations of Riley’s Egyptian palette with the dates specified as 1981- 2003 and 2009 – 1981 respectively. These works are prime examples of the artist’s belief that, in realising her concept, her task is always to draw the viewer’s attention to the explosive facts of actually looking . While emphasising the conceptual point she wishes to make, her artwork also becomes a joyful celebration of its visually satisfying result.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hilarie M. Sheets, Art + Auction , New York, May 2010, pp 103 and 104
Karsten Schubert, Bridget Riley: Complete Prints , London, 2010, pp 7 and 8