Bridget Riley

Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2003

Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Bridget Riley, 2003, no. 9, illustrated in colour
Berlin, Galerie Max Hetzler, Bridget Riley: Paintings and Related Work 1983-2010, 2011, p. 21, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the yellow is darker in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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“In Delos (1983)… blue, turquoise and emerald hues alternate with rich yellows, reds and white. It draws you in while also deflecting your view like translucent gauze.”

Jörg Heiser, ‘Review: Bridget Riley, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin’, Frieze, Issue 193, May 2011.

Bridget Riley's Delos is an outstanding exemplification of the pure chromatic sensation idiosyncratic to the Op-Artist’s very best work. Executed in 1983, and belonging to the cycle of 'Egyptian Palette' paintings produced in the aftermath of Riley's profoundly influential travels in the winter of 1979-1980, Delos stands among the most optically arresting and jubilant of this important series. Striated in vertiginous bands of seeming endless variegation, Riley's masterful command of colour, line and composition belies its formal restriction to only six individual hues articulated within a constancy of stripe width. Indeed, while the linear pattern of Delos fundamentally stabilises and structures the picture plane, the chromatic reaction of one colour juxtaposed against another incites an optical illusion that engenders a wavering and rhythmic chromatic pulsation.  Named after the Greek island of Delos, this intensely evocative painting is rooted in memory and suffused with sheer kaleidoscopic sensorial affect.

During the winter of 1979-1980 Riley travelled to Egypt, where she studied first-hand the tombs of the Pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings. Immediately struck with the art found in the ancient crypts, the evocation of light and life exuberantly articulated with a surprisingly limited number of chromatic hues had a profoundly lasting affect: restricted to red, blue, yellow, turquoise, green, black and white Riley recognised the constancy of these colours and their application in all aspects of life in Ancient Egypt. Upon her return, these colours continued to exercise a fascination and directly invoked a fundamental transformation in Riley's work. Invoking the sensorial memory of her travels, the paintings produced between 1980 and 1985 exhibit Riley's free reconstruction of the restricted yet intensely vibrant and bold chromatic palette discovered abroad. In the pursuit of a pure and primary visual experience, maximum chromatic luminosity and effect demanded a return to a heightened graphic simplicity that recalled Riley's black and white striped compositions from the early 1970s. As masterfully exhibited in Delos, the arbitrary dissemination of only five hues across one-hundred and two vertical stripes confers a tonal interaction that transgresses linear boundaries to confer an intense harmonic resonance.  As outlined by Jörg Heiser: “In Delos (1983)… blue, turquoise and emerald hues alternate with rich yellows, reds and white. It draws you in while also deflecting your view like translucent gauze; the effect is one of dense compression working against the exuberance of the colours, like an unnervingly steady frequency throbbing in your head on a sunny day” (Jörg Heiser, ‘Review: Bridget Riley, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin’, Frieze, Issue 193, May 2011).

Encountered at a typical viewing distance the scale of Delos engulfs our field of vision while the immaculate and measured distribution of vertical strips provides a deeply satisfying sense of geometric order. We are immersed in the nuanced and undulating colour juxtapositions that mediate chromatic passages of differing intensities. One detects echoes, repetitions and inversions. However, any search for cogent patternation is utterly thwarted: our sight and cognition are disarmed and abandoned for sheer immersive splendour. The eye is unable to settle, our vision is constantly moving to traverse the linear geometry of Riley's composition invoking an unstable viewing experience that mirrors our optical cognitive faculties. Riley explains: "colours are organised on the canvas so that the eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. Vision can be arrested, tripped up or pulled back in order to float free again" (Bridget Riley, 'The Pleasures of Sight (1984)', Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Britain, Bridget Riley, 2003, p. 213).

Delos summates over thirty years of Bridget Riley's dedicated engagement with the possibilities of colour. In the 1950s she first made studies from Georges Seurat, through whose work and dialogue with colour theory Riley came to understand the complexities and atmospheric effects of tone and colour. During the 1980s, this formative dialogue with the French painters of Classical Modernism was reinvigorated in the Egyptian Palette works and complemented by a series of lectures on colour theory given by the artist. What’s more, in 1983 for the first time in fifteen years, Riley returned to Venice to once again study the paintings that form the basis of European colourism.  Representing magnificent expression of these prescient concerns, the pure sensation of Delos consummately fulfils Robert Kudielka’s assertion: "One can see that the 'stripe' paintings of 1980-85 hold a unique position in Riley's works… at moments she comes close to realising a dream of every colourist, to make the spectator oblivious of form" (Robert Kudielka, 'The Paintings of the Years 1982-1992', Exhibition Catalogue, London, Hayward Gallery, Bridget Riley, 1992, p. 42).