BRIDGET RILEY TOWARDS COLOUR rd
UpDown gallery is delighted to announce its 3 exhibition, Towards Colour, by renowned British artist Bridget Riley. Born in 1931, in London, Bridget Riley became the first female artist to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1968, which has long been a benchmark and launch pad for many world-­‐renowned artists. Riley’s unique sense of colour was apparent to her from an early age and she vividly remembers walking with her sister and mother along the beaches and coastal paths of Cornwall where they holidayed. Colours and shapes would jump out at her and she remembers looking out over a calm sea, seeing the various shapes and colours shimmering and jostling for position on the horizon forming abstracted paintings in front of her eyes. It was an experience that has influenced Riley’s work over the decades and has inspired numerous artists. Other artists inspired by similar experiences include most noteworthy JMW Turner who was so taken by the seascapes of South East Kent. Riley’s, ‘Op Art’, a now acknowledged term to categorise her optically challenging black and white works made in the early 60s, came about almost by mistake. Her artistic practise, which involves painstaking arranging and rearranging of the different elements of a composition until the balance and desired frequency has been achieved, is only complete when the work has exactly the right resonance for Riley. In the 1980s Riley travelled extensively and it was after a trip to Egypt that Riley moved toward colour in her work beginning a series termed her ‘Egyptian Palette’, which echoed the burnt, smouldering and rich colours she experienced. Riley always believed that the best way to see colours was to live with them and experience them. She was greatly influenced by Seurat, one of the world’s best colourists, and fully acknowledges that it was through directly copying one of his paintings that she had a break through with her own understanding of colour. “An artist has to be realistic or they wouldn’t be able to realise anything. Imagination has to be captured by reality” -­‐ Riley Riley’s main focus is on her paintings, but like many artists she fully appreciates the role that printmaking plays in her artistic process. Having had major retrospectives at Tate and MoMA it is exciting for UpDown to be able to show an overview of her printmaking output from 1962 through to her latest prints published in 2012. Moving through her iconic optical black and white 60s prints toward the introduction of colour, illustrating the changing use of lines and curves, which are then moved on from to be revisited years later. Two prints in particular sum up Riley’s acute sense of colour, ‘Ra 2’ and ‘Silvered 2’ 1981, a pair of screenprints using exactly the same limited colour palette but in different combinations, producing completely different results. Although this principal is an on going dialogue Riley uses these two prints to illustrate to the viewer how she can manipulate colour to heighten the viewers experience. “Art is a social act, my work is completed by the viewer” -­‐ Riley Riley remains a major figure within the British and International art world and her work continues to push the boundaries of colour and composition. A very private artist she rarely gives interviews, preferring her work to do the talking. TOWARDS COLOUR by Bridget Riley, 16th February -­‐ 30th March, at UpDown Gallery is shown in collaboration with her dealer Karsten Schubert in London. For more information and images please contact the gallery at [email protected] or call 01843 588181. (Image top: Red 2005) (Image below: La Lune En Rodage – CarloBelloli 1965)