Bridget Riley: 'I want my paintings to make people feel alive' by Jackie Wullschläger
November 2025
Bridget Riley, queen of abstract painting, is 94 and lives alone in a six-storey white stuccoed Victorian house with a yellow front door in west London. For more than half a century, she has got out of bed here, gone straight to the studio and worked “within the inner logic of an invented reality” to create the stripes, curves and discs in shimmering gradated colour that dazzle us into feeling that her paintings, and we ourselves, are in swaying, surging motion.
She always hoped that “once you step across the threshold, you can move about in these paintings, you can inhabit them and enjoy the spaces and places that are built there”. In a gallery facing the sea at Margate’s new Turner Contemporary exhibition of her monumental works, purple, brown, green and turquoise circles flicker like a constellation of stars as the eye scans “Dancing to the Music of Time” (2022). In old age, Riley still makes geometric abstraction popular, gripping and enveloping.