Bridget Riley

Colourful canvases with optical effects

With an unprecedented pursuit of clarity, and with great precision and discipline, Bridget Riley (1931) has been working on her sensational oeuvre for over sixty years. The British artist is known for her colourful canvases with optical effects, which enable her to attract a wide audience to abstract art. She creates work on the flat plane, but the dizzying lines make it seem to bulge, distort or undulate. Riley manages to play off colour and form - the traditional ingredients of painting - in tightly orchestrated movements in such a way that the viewer often feels overwhelmed.

Mondrian

Bridget Riley has been fascinated by the work of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) for years. Not only because of their shared interest in geometric compositions, but also because Mondrian worked throughout his life to poetically translate a deep yearning for the harmony of paint, form and colour. The Mondrian works shown here were selected by Bridget Riley as her favourites because they were, and still are, important in the development of her own oeuvre.

Grande dame of British painting

Bridget Riley lives and works in London. She studied at Goldsmith College and at the Royal College of Art. She became instantly famous in the 1960s with her paintings in black and white full of geometric patterns that seem to move. She herself was not impressed by this sudden celebrity. She sought, step by step, to establish a firm relationship with the tradition of painting. According to Riley, abstraction is still in its infancy. She hopes to take a further step, however small, with her work. Bridget Riley has received numerous awards and prizes, including the International Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale.