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Bridget Riley
Week 08/03/2021
This week has been fairly hectic with my university work, therefore this piece is going to be fairly quick and smaller than the rest. I have decided that my artist of the week starting the eighth of March 2021 is Bridget Riley.
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I only discovered Riley last year. Now I am aware that I’m late to the party and that she’s been well established female British artist for about 70 years. But nevertheless, I’m glad I found her work. Since knowing about Bridget Riley I have seen a lot of her work come up on different social media. I believe this is due to her bold colours and creative fun feel of her modern art. Her work is exciting.
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I went to her exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in Southbank on 25 January 2020. I remember lining up waiting to go in. It was the early stages of Covid, I was aware of it but I believe there were one or two cases in the UK. It’s weird to think about that time having no clue about the magnitude of the events that would take place that year. I went on the last day that the exhibition is open and I managed to get a student ticket last minute. I remember seeing the exhibition advertised on what to do in London on a timeout website. And looking back I’m very pleased I went. The Hayward Gallery sits on Southbank and it is an amazing building. It may not look much from its exterior with its controversial brutalism style but the interior is quite simply amazing. It’s a great place to view and display work. Reilly’s work is commonly on a very large scale and so the gallery was perfect, high ceilings, simple white walls, creamy coloured stone flooring with a modern ceiling full of pipes and air vents. This interior contrasting with her bold modern and colourful geometric designs.
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The exhibition was branded as Bridget Riley; a major retrospective exhibition devoted to the work of the celebrated British artist. I think these are quite simple words compared to the magnitude of her work. At the time I thought her exhibition was great, looking back over a year on I think it was marvellous. No masks, crowds of people looking at pieces fighting for the best spot, even the queue getting in, now it’s a special day for me, the last exhibition before everything changed.
Above as always, I will show you photos of the work I really liked. A lot of her work is based on the idea of an optical illusion - simple black-and-white shapes which make your head spin. There was so much work on the walls that even though the place was busy it wasn’t uncomfortable and you got to see each piece. One of the rooms which may have been my favourite was a large room filled with hundreds of photo frames filled with Riley’s development and planning of the initial ideas. Her work is mathematical, all originally sketched out as technical drawings. This room was great as you could see the planning and the thought process. If you compared the different pieces in the frames you could see similarities in the shapes, colours and themes.
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One-piece which headlined the exhibition is called ‘Nataraja.’ It was painted in 1993 oil on canvas. If you look at the work digitally it looks like print or that it’s been created on software. Once you see it in person you realise this is not the case. You can see the brushstrokes, you can see whether paint gets thick on the edges. On her large pieces, I really liked the way she painted often to the edge of the canvas. The edge of the canvas was about 6 cm wide filled with different colours and splodges. And then her signature and maybe the name of the painting roughly scribbled on. To me, it looked like she wasn’t hiding the fact that it is a piece of art. I personally thought it made the piece charming and humane which was a nice touch.
I’m a big fan of foodie installations. There was a piece in the exhibition called ‘Continuum 1963/2005.’ It is Rileys only 3D piece of work. It takes the form of a continuous painted surface that spirals around itself encapsulating the viewer. On the explanation it said that Bridget Riley was influenced by the vast curved canvases of the French painter Claude Monet, looking at how his work was ‘drifting and gathering of sight itself.’ The piece creates the idea of the viewer being completely absorbed in it. I remembered queueing up and going inside the piece, I like the piece however I preferred the 3D structure that was containing it. I am aware this is a very odd comment to make, saying that I preferred the structure rather than the artwork but the structure was beautiful. It was a shiny metal tool structure in the corner of a room. I personally think the reason why it wasn’t flush against a wall and that you could walk around it was so that it was part of the exhibition and it was there to be admired as well. You could stand at the top of the platform and look down onto the piece and see the circle formation and people inside it. One thing that I really love about art is when as a viewer you can experience it one on one. Without other people being around and this is what the piece highlighted to me. To me, the piece and the metal structure gleaned under the reflecting large exhibition lights.
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Bridget Riley; A very short artist of the week, nevertheless an important one. Firstly important because I really like her work. I don’t necessarily think that her modern art is too controversial, you either like it or it’s not your cup of tea but personally, I would find it confusing if you weren’t like her style. It is modern art but without the deeper meaning or it been eccentric. Secondly, it was the last exhibition I saw before the world completely changed, before Covid was a global pandemic. I saw this exhibition over a year ago longer than I’ve seen most of my family and friends. I find that hard to grasp as it does feel like I saw the exhibition years and years ago. Lastly, I think it is important to highlight the success Bridget Riley has had in her long extensive 17-year career as a British female artist. I’m excited to see if Bridget Riley creates more work in her 90s.
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I will leave links below to videos that I liked about the exhibition and Bridget Riley’s technique.
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Thank you for reading and have a lovely week.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTv1biPq4Cc
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af3RgRRAGa4
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