A focused exhibition of early work by Bridget Riley opens today at Dia Beacon, bringing together six of the artist’s earliest black-and-white paintings.
Opening today, 3rd July 2026, and remaining on long-term view, Bridget Riley marks the first presentation of the artist’s work at Dia Beacon. It follows Dia Art Foundation’s earlier engagement with Riley in Bridget Riley: Reconnaissance, staged at Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 2000–01.
The exhibition focuses on a pivotal four-year period between 1961 and 1964, when Riley developed the precise black-and-white compositions that brought her international recognition. Three of the works, including one of the artist’s rare shaped canvases, are from Dia’s collection and have never previously been shown by the institution.
“With Bridget Riley’s work, viewers are challenged to become acutely aware of their own acts of looking,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director. “Through a seemingly restrained visual language, she generates an extraordinary sense of movement and space. Riley’s exploration of perception places her in a fascinating dialogue with many of the artistic tenets Dia has long been engaged with.”
One of the most influential painters of the postwar period, Riley used line, shape and pattern to create compositions that appear to move, compress and expand as the viewer changes position. Rather than simply producing optical illusions, the paintings activate the space between artwork and audience, turning perception itself into the subject.
The six works at Dia Beacon capture Riley at the beginning of this investigation. Created from painstakingly intricate line-based and geometric motifs, they demonstrate the range of visual and physical sensations she was able to produce using only black and white.
Riley introduced colour into her work in 1967 and never returned to a strictly monochrome palette. Yet the paintings made during these formative years established many of the questions around movement, rhythm, space and perception that would continue to shape her work for the following six decades.
“Although Riley has been the subject of several exhibitions outside the United Kingdom and Europe in recent years, she remains under-recognized in the United States,”
said Emily Markert, curatorial associate.
“This exhibition offers Dia’s audiences a critical opportunity to experience the early experiments with rhythm and contrast that catapulted her to international acclaim and placed her at the center of New York’s art discourse in the mid-1960s. At once futuristic yet characteristic of their time, these works’ optical effects are irreproducible through a photo or screen, both reflecting and rejecting the digital age.”
The exhibition also returns Riley’s work to the context of New York, where her black-and-white paintings became central to debates around abstraction and perception during the 1960s.
“Riley’s examination of geometric forms and color reached a critical point in her black-and-white paintings of the 1960s, a body of work that initiated her sustained engagement with the mechanics of perception as a primary subject,”
said Liv Cuniberti, curatorial assistant.
“More than five decades after they were made, these paintings remain radical in their visual effect, resonating with the continuously shifting conditions of seeing in contemporary culture.”
Curated by Liv Cuniberti and Emily Markert, the exhibition offers a concentrated look at the moment Riley established the visual language that would shape the rest of her career—and at paintings whose effects still depend on the physical act of standing in front of them.
Bridget Riley, from 3rd July 2026, on long-term view at Dia Beacon, New York.
About the artist
Bridget Riley was born in London in 1931. She studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, from 1949 to ’52, and at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to ’55, initially producing figurative and landscape paintings before developing an optically driven style in 1961. Since the mid-1960s, her work has been presented internationally, including in the pivotal exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1965), and the Venice Biennale (1968), where she represented Great Britain. Recent solo exhibitions include Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio, the Art Institute of Chicago (2022–23), traveling to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023), and the Morgan Museum and Library, New York (2023); Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (2022); and Bridget Riley: Learning to See, Turner Contemporary, Margate, United Kingdom (2025–26). Riley was named a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1974 and appointed the Companion of Honour in 1999. She has also been awarded a 2003 Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association, the 2009 Kaiserring of the City of Goslar, and the 2012 Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen. Riley lives in London.
