Bridget Riley’s restless, rigorous works have fascinated art lovers since, in the 1960s, she first created her abstract, op-art-inflected paintings that beguile the eye with their sense of flickering movement and space.
Sense of flickering space … Blaze Study (1962) by Bridget Riley. Photograph: Tate
Now audiences around the country will be able to see, for the first time in the UK, four major recent works lent by Riley herself, alongside seminal paintings from the 1960s and a number of works on paper. Among the last group are three “colour study” pieces from 1967, which have never before left Riley’s studio and which she has now donated to the Arts Council collection.
Among the earlier works is her Movement in Squares, bought by the Arts Council collection in 1962, a year after it was made.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a new essay by Riley, in which she describes the process that brought her to this mode of abstract painting.
The recent works that Riley is to lend to the exhibition include Painting With Verticals I (2006). The extent to which her artistic concerns have both developed and stayed consistent are evident: there is a more complex play of verticals, diagonals and curves; and she has moved away from monochrome to use a warm palette of pinks and browns.
The exhibition is the first in a series under the collective title Flashback, which, organised by the Hayward Gallery in London and drawn largely from the Arts Council collection (which it administrates), will tour museums in England.
Exhibition opens at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (25 September – 13 December 2009) and tours to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (6 February – 23 May 2010), Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery (5 June – 5 September) and Southampton City Art Gallery (17 September – 5 December). via (Guardian.co.uk)
