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拍品專文
In Bridget Riley’s Painting with Verticals 1, vibrant interlocking curvilinear forms in fuchsia, fiery orange, tan and seafoam green dance across a vast horizontal frieze stretching nearly four metres in width. Executed in 2006, the work demonstrates Riley’s deft command of painting’s formal elements: a refined chromatic scheme is liberated through form to achieve a dazzling fluidity across the surface of the canvas. In this period Riley was seeking to celebrate ‘the pleasures of sight,’ working almost exclusively on a grand scale. A significant work within Riley’s practice, Painting with Verticals 1 has been included in several major museum surveys of the artist’s oeuvre, including her landmark retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2008; Bridget Riley: Flashback, a UK travelling exhibition which opened at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, in 2009; and Bridget Riley: Malerei / Painting 1980-2012 at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, in 2012.
The curve lies at the heart of Riley’s decades-long investigation into the sensory and spiritual possibilities of abstraction. In 1960 Riley visited Venice with fellow artist Maurice de Sausmarez, where she encountered the work of Futurist painters such as Giacomo Balla. She was impressed by the sense of innate movement contained in Balla’s dynamic black and white compositions. Meanwhile in London, American Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were being exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery, at that time the epicentre of contemporary art in Britain. Previously Riley had looked to artists such as Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne for inspiration, refining their dazzling Pointillist and Cubist landscapes into vibratory compositions formed from basic geometric elements such as squares, circles, and triangles. Now she reversed this process, allowing the formal elements of painting to themselves dictate, rather than merely support, the development of her compositions. Identifying a freedom in the curved line, in 1961 Riley painted Kiss, which marked a crucial juncture in her practice. Emboldened, she developed complex variations on the curve which would propel her onto the international stage as a leader of the burgeoning global Op-Art movement.
From the early black and white monochromes emerged an intense spectrum of colour, often inspired by the kaleidoscopic wonders of nature and ancient art witnessed on travels to places such as Egypt. Following an extended period working exclusively with stripes, Riley added strong diagonals to create a sensation of vigour and cross-movement. Finally, in works such as the present, Riley combined these vertical and diagonal lines with the curve which had so inspired her early abstracts. She wields an unmatched grasp of colour: how it affects the visual pace of looking, how it expands and morphs in the eye of the viewer into something profound and transcendental. The effect of standing in front of these paintings moves beyond the visual. Riley paints the very sensation of sight; she captures what it feels like to look.
The technical and emotive force of Painting with Verticals 1 is the product of more than four decades of restless innovation. Working with the elementary components of form and colour, it reveals an evocative mastery of rhythm and repetition. When Riley showed the critic David Sylvester her first painting to employ a curvilinear composition in this manner, he mused that ‘it shows there is more than one way out of Matisse.’ A dazzling chromatic euphony, in Painting with Verticals 1 paint becomes animate, evoking the perpetual flux of the natural world. It is with such radiant, vital canvases that Riley has propelled art history forward, forging a powerful new visual idiom for the twenty-first century.
The curve lies at the heart of Riley’s decades-long investigation into the sensory and spiritual possibilities of abstraction. In 1960 Riley visited Venice with fellow artist Maurice de Sausmarez, where she encountered the work of Futurist painters such as Giacomo Balla. She was impressed by the sense of innate movement contained in Balla’s dynamic black and white compositions. Meanwhile in London, American Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were being exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery, at that time the epicentre of contemporary art in Britain. Previously Riley had looked to artists such as Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne for inspiration, refining their dazzling Pointillist and Cubist landscapes into vibratory compositions formed from basic geometric elements such as squares, circles, and triangles. Now she reversed this process, allowing the formal elements of painting to themselves dictate, rather than merely support, the development of her compositions. Identifying a freedom in the curved line, in 1961 Riley painted Kiss, which marked a crucial juncture in her practice. Emboldened, she developed complex variations on the curve which would propel her onto the international stage as a leader of the burgeoning global Op-Art movement.
From the early black and white monochromes emerged an intense spectrum of colour, often inspired by the kaleidoscopic wonders of nature and ancient art witnessed on travels to places such as Egypt. Following an extended period working exclusively with stripes, Riley added strong diagonals to create a sensation of vigour and cross-movement. Finally, in works such as the present, Riley combined these vertical and diagonal lines with the curve which had so inspired her early abstracts. She wields an unmatched grasp of colour: how it affects the visual pace of looking, how it expands and morphs in the eye of the viewer into something profound and transcendental. The effect of standing in front of these paintings moves beyond the visual. Riley paints the very sensation of sight; she captures what it feels like to look.
The technical and emotive force of Painting with Verticals 1 is the product of more than four decades of restless innovation. Working with the elementary components of form and colour, it reveals an evocative mastery of rhythm and repetition. When Riley showed the critic David Sylvester her first painting to employ a curvilinear composition in this manner, he mused that ‘it shows there is more than one way out of Matisse.’ A dazzling chromatic euphony, in Painting with Verticals 1 paint becomes animate, evoking the perpetual flux of the natural world. It is with such radiant, vital canvases that Riley has propelled art history forward, forging a powerful new visual idiom for the twenty-first century.