Bridget Riley: Past into Present - Hardcover

Riley, Bridget; De Chassey, Éric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1644230666 ISBN 13: 9781644230664

Publisher: David Zwirner Books, 2023

Synopsis

Renowned British artist Bridget Riley’s paintings have provoked powerful sensations through their formally taut, abstract compositions over the course of her more than six-decade career. In this new body of work, Riley returns to earlier ideas and takes them into further and surprising directions.

About this title

About the Author

One of the most significant artists working today, Bridget Riley’s dedication to the interaction of form and color has led to a continued exploration of perception. From the early 1960s, she has used elementary shapes such as lines, circles, curves, and squares to create visual experiences that actively engage the viewer, at times triggering optical sensations of vibration and movement. Her earliest black-and-white compositions offer impressions of several other pigments, while ensuing, multi-chromatic works present color as an active component. Although abstract, her practice is closely linked with nature, which she understands to be “the dynamism of visual forces―an event rather than an appearance.”

Eric de Chassey is the director of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, and a professor of modern and contemporary art history at the École normale supérieure in Lyon, France. Between 2009 and 2015, he was the director of the French Academy in Rome, Villa Medici. He has published extensively on American and European art, transatlantic cultural relationships, and the visual culture of the second half of the twentieth century.

From the Back Cover

ôI am sometimes asked æWhat is your objectiveÆ and this I cannot truthfully answer. I work æfromÆ something rather than ætowardsÆ something. It is a process of discovery.ö Since 1961, Riley has focused exclusively on seemingly simple geometric forms, such as lines, circles, curves, and squares, arrayed across a surfaceùwhether a canvas, wall, or paperùaccording to an internal logic. The resulting compositions actively engage the viewer, at times triggering sensations of vibration and movement. In the present selection, Riley advances her Measure by Measure series, her most extensive body of work to date, into a new, darker color palette. Once again, changing the way we look and offering a powerful effect on our eyes.

This sense of dynamism was explored to great effect in the artistÆs earliest black-and-white paintings, which established the basis of her enduring formal vocabulary. In 2020, after visiting her own earlier works at her retrospective exhibition organized by the National Galleries of Scotl

Edition details

• Publisher: David Zwirner Books
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1644230666
• ISBN 13: 9781644230664
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80