Exceptional Works Bridget Riley

“The more I look at Bridget Riley’s art, the less I know about what I thought I knew about seeing.”

—Richard Shiff

Bridget Riley

Byzantium, 1969

Acrylic on canvas

65 3/8 x 146 1/2 inches
166 x 372 cm

An arresting example of Bridget Riley’s exceptional optical compositions, Byzantium (1969) is one of her earliest paintings in color, a shift she made in 1967.

Byzantium is a panoramic arrangement of diagonal lines in alternating red, chartreuse, and purple tones—one of only a small number of compositions in this format. The rhythmic interaction of color and line releases colored light into pure white intervals to create an effect Riley refers to as “disembodied color sensation.” This approach has propelled her investigations of form and color to this day.

“More than anything else I want my paintings to exist on their own terms.… For those with open eyes, serenely disclosing some intimations of the splendors to which pure sight alone has the key.”

—Bridget Riley, “The Pleasures of Sight,” 1984

Bridget Riley with Byzantium in her SPACE studio at St. Katherine Docks, 1969 (detail). Photo by Jorge Lewinski

Byzantium was made just a year after the artist’s unprecedented achievement as the first British contemporary painter and the first woman ever to be awarded the International Prize for Painting at the 34th Venice Biennale in 1968.

During this time, Riley also cofounded SPACE studios, an organization that continues today to provide artists with affordable studios in warehouse buildings in London. Byzantium was made in the artist’s SPACE studio, then located at St. Katharine’s Dock. This cavernous and open area allowed Riley to make work on this large scale and sparked an especially productive and innovative period in her practice.

Installation view, Bridget Riley, Late Morning (Horizontal), 1967–8, in Op Art in Focus, Tate Liverpool, 2018. Photo © Tate. Collection Tate

In 1967, after Riley’s international success with her black and white paintings, she began to introduce gray tones and then color into her work for the first time. This leap expanded the perceptual and optical possibilities of the geometric forms the artist had pursued since 1961, such as lines, circles, curves, and squares. The movement and sensations achieved from this shift, as is clear in Byzantium, are a striking testament to the artist’s ongoing investigation of the relationship between form and color.

“Riley began by limiting the palette—two then three colors plus white—and used the line as a formal vehicle. This long and thin unit (which provides what Riley terms ‘edge exposure’) could carry color well and could be crossed, twisted, curved, or diagonally slanted. It enabled her to build up color fields in a way that would not have been possible with more complex geometric forms.”

—Robert Kudielka, “Synopsis,” in Bridget Riley: The Complete Paintings, Volume 1: 1959–1973, 2018

Bridget Riley, Veld, 1971 (detail). © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra / Bridgeman Images

“I found that the principles that lay behind [my black and white paintings]—contrast, harmony, reversal, repetition, movement, rhythm, etc.—could be recast in color and with a new freedom.”

—Bridget Riley, “At the End of My Pencil,” 2009

Installation view, Bridget Riley, Prairie, 2003/1971 (left), and Arioso (Blue), 2013 (right), in Bridget Riley: The Stripe Paintings 1961–2014, David Zwirner, London, 2014

The sense of visual pleasure in Riley’s work is an idea derived as much from the artist’s formative encounters with old master and impressionist painting as from her early experiences with nature. Georges Seurat’s treatment of line and color presents, in Riley’s words, “an experience just beyond our visual grasp … the im-perceptible.”

Georges Seurat, La Luzerne, Saint-Denis, 1884–1885 (detail). National Galleries Scotland

“Whatever the occasion might be, the pleasures of sight have one characteristic in common—they take you by surprise. They are sudden, swift, and unexpected ... [as well as] enigmatic and elusive.”

—Bridget Riley, “The Pleasures of Sight”

Bridget Riley, Study for Byzantium, 1969. Victoria & Albert Museum, London

“After a period of looking at Riley’s colored stripes, my eyes can no longer keep up with the struggle to separate and locate the blues and greens within their bounding of red, and the whole color change of the picture seems to detach itself from the canvas and come free in my eye, then glowing takes on a different meaning. Glowing is my word, my verb, for what is actually happening in my eye.”

—Andrew Forge, “On Looking at Paintings by Bridget Riley,” Art International, 1971

Installation view, Bridget Riley, Byzantium, 1969 (center), in Bridget Riley: A Retrospective, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, 2008. © Pierre Antoine

Installation view, Bridget Riley, Byzantium, 1969 (right), in Bridget Riley: Paintings from the 1960s and 70, Serpentine Gallery, London, 1999

A detail of Bridget Riley's Byzantium, 1969, on the cover of Bridget Riley: Selected Paintings 1961–1999, published by Kunstverein Für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2000.

Installation view, Bridget Riley, Byzantium, 1969 (left), in Bridget Riley: Paintings and drawings, 1951–71, Kunstverein Hannover, 1970

“Perception constitutes our awareness of what it is to be human, indeed what it is to be alive.”

—Bridget Riley, 2017

Bridget Riley with her painting Byzantium, 1969, before opening her overview of works at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf on October 29, 1999. © Timo Mitze / Picture Alliance/ dpa / Bridgeman Images

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