“
“Being an artist does mean knowing something about oneself,” she says. “The way in which you do that is through working.”
Bridget Riley
60s Op Art painter Bridget Riley at 77 continues her exploration of movement, light and space. Riley’s new show, Flashback at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool has recently opened and will be on display until December 13 2009.
The exhibition will track her influential approach including eight large scale paintings, with four coming from Riley’s personal collection. Alongside these are around 30 drawings and studies that illuminate her working methods over her five-decade-long-career.
I’m equally inspired by these portraits of Riley with her work connecting the artist to most radical decade of the 20th century. The op art movement, launched in 1965 at the New York exhibition – The Responsive Eye, at the Museum of Modern Art cemented Riley’s vision. Contrary to the perception of this movement associated with drug experiences, Riley’s real influence of optical effects came from 19th-century pointillist Georges Seurat.
But the commercialisation of Op Art created a disdain of the ‘rag trade’ by the artist with the use of her graphics for T-shirts and dresses. This photograph of The Who in 1966 shows them posing in front of the Union flag, with the drummer Keith Moon in a T-shirt with Riley’s painting Blaze.
A serious artist, Riley’s quest for utopia was also driven by space. As Van Gogh attempted to build a community of artists, Riley established her own collective called SPACE which is going strong after 40 years.
