Bridget Riley

The Artist
Karsten Schubert Gallery, London, where acquired by the present owners, 28th June 2004

London, Tate, Bridget Riley, 26th June - 28th September 2003, cat. no.55, illustrated;
Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art, Bridget Riley: Paintings 1961-2004, 14th December 2004 - 6th March 2005, cat. no.37, illustrated, with British Council tour to City Gallery, Wellington;
Aarau, Araguer Kunsthaus, Bridget Riley - Bilder und Zeichnungen 1959-2005, 17th September - 13th November 2005, cat. no.43, illustrated; 
Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Bridget Riley, 12th June - 14th September 2008, cat. no.49, illustrated.

Robert Kudielka, Robert Kudielka on Bridget Riley - Essays & Interviews 1972-2003, Ridinghouse, London, 2005, p.207, illustrated.

We are grateful to Philip Young of Philip Young Conservation, Studio 3, Nutbrook Studios, 33 Nutbrook Street, London, SE15 4JU for preparing the below condition report. Condition: LEFT PANEL: The turnover edges have almost continuous hairline cracking as often seen on these works. There is a small loss of paint to the green area in the lower right corner. The general canvas tension is poor and there appears to be some compression of the canvas in at the stretcher edge over the moulding on the lower right and lower left side with a number of soft bumps and dents up the lower right side. The distortions described may all pull out once the tension is adjusted. There is a fly spot in the upper right with bumps in the lower edge canvas located 102cm (inwards dent) in from the right, 86cm in from the right (inwards) and 63 cm in from the right (outwards bump). Possible Treatment: The poor tension is often seen on these works and as described the new bumps and dents may pull out when it is improved. The paint loss can be filled and inpainted, the fly spot removed and the residual dents reduced. It is difficult to state in the absence of pre-reports when the denting may have occurred. RIGHT PANEL: This also has the hairline cracking as described with some compression again, in this case in the areas of the fixing plates for the transit frame so may be associated with handling during packing or unpacking. Canvas tension is again slack but not t the extent as the left panel, and an area of the edge hairline cracking has opened up sharply in the green area 44cm from the left edge. There is a small paint loss on the turnover edge by the lower left mirror plate and there is a white spot accretion in the purple area left of centre on the upper edge. Possible Treatment: The tension should be improved and this should reduce the dents. The spots can be removed, the paint loss unpainted and the open hairline cracking consolidated. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Bridget Riley belongs to that generation of British painters for whom the exhibitions of Modern American painting held at the Tate in the late 1950s – as well as the Whitechapel’s Jackson Pollock retrospective of 1958 - were hugely influential. The impact of these shows, however, was not so much to do with the visual language of the New York School, but more with its scale and physical presence, which in turn made viewing them an immersive, all-encompassing experience. Riley’s breakthrough black & white paintings of the early 1960s on the whole tend to be on a scale large enough at least to occupy the viewer’s immediate field of vision, fixing the gaze entirely on the intense optical experience occurring in front of our very eyes. But as she began to introduce colour into her work in the late 1960s and the paintings became more about syncopations of colour and hue that repeat, vary, then return, so the wide-format panoramic canvases typical of Abstract Expressionism become more prevalent, especially in the series of curvilinear works begun in the late 1990s, to which the monumental Parade 2 belongs.

There are, of course, fundamental differences between Riley’s work, which revolves around the dissolution of the surface of the painting, to the point that it appears to exist in a space somewhere between the viewer and the canvas, and Abstract Expressionism, which is concerned with the painting’s own materiality, as object. And even in later works such as Parade 2, where ‘plastic’ concerns of surface pattern and form are more in evidence, Riley is still primarily creating optical effects of refraction and iridescence: an artist like Pollock, inevitably, returns you to the physicality of the paint itself, whereas Riley always points you away from the surface, to light.

When Riley first introduced colour into her work in 1967, it was restricted to two or three, arranged in vertical stripes –one colour resonating against the other in a long, sustained note. However, as she has always worked empirically – rather than to any mathematical system – it didn’t take long for Riley to push the boundaries of her vocabulary, first through increasing the number of colours and their various densities, and then by breaking up the vertical structure. This creates what Riley, who is herself a wonderful and profound writer on colour and perception, describes as the ‘repetition, contrast, calculated reversal and counterpoint’ that 'parallels the basis of our emotional structure’ (Riley, 'Perception is the Medium' (1965), reprinted in Robert Kudielka (ed.), The Eye's Mind - Bridget Riley, Collected Writings 1965-1999, London,1999, p.66).

In her work of the 1980s and 90s, angled ‘zigs’ (to use her studio term) cut across the vertical, shifting colours into more complex relationships, but by the later 1990s these zigs then soften and curve, coalescing into the larger shapes we see in Parade – extreme close-ups of the winding helices of 1960s ‘wave’ works like the Song of Orpheus series, but now refracted through a counterpoint vertical geometry, the same underlying grid of verticals and diagonals that Riley has always used to construct her work now brought to the surface.  As Paul Moorehouse writes in his introduction to the Tate’s 2003 retrospective catalogue, in works such as Reve (1999, Private Collection), Parade 2 (2002) and Evoe (2003 – Tate, London), ‘there unfolds a new and surprising treatment of pictorial space. The geometric world of the zigs, with its sharply articulated textures, myriad densities and unstable areas of refracted light and shade, has led to another kind of place. This is a world of sinuous, winding movement in which expanded areas of contrasted colour flicker and dance – space, shape and hue joined in a rhythmic celebration of sensation. In this respect, the curve paintings move towards nature, but nature where there now resonates a living, moving presence’ (Tate, Bridget Riley, op. cit., p.29).