This extensively illustrated hardback book explores the dialogue between monochrome and colour in the artist’s work, spanning over 50 years of Bridget Riley’s career.
This volume accompanied the exhibition Bridget Riley: Paintings 1963–2015 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which tracks Riley’s work up to the recent re-introduction of a palette of black and white. It includes essays by Éric de Chassey and Frances Spalding as well as a historic interview with the artist by Robert Kudielka, which together contextualise Riley’s early developments and demonstrate how her latest paintings progress directly out of a rigorous engagement with colour.
Riley gained critical attention internationally for her black-and-white paintings during the mid-1960s, using elementary shapes to engage the eye by creating flux and rhythm within the pictorial field. Throughout the succeeding decades, Riley has continued her investigation into perception through related bodies of work in rich colour.
Éric de Chassey is an art historian and curator based in Paris. Robert Kudielka is an art historian and a former professor of aesthetics and philosophy of art at the University of the Arts, Berlin. Frances Spalding is an art historian and Editor of The Burlington Magazine.
Images © 2016 Bridget Riley. All rights reserved. Courtesy Karsten Schubert, London
