.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
Held in the same private collection for more than three decades, Bridget Riley’s Daphne (1988) is a tour de force of colour and form. The canvas is structured through a kaleidoscopic series of interlocking rhomboids, forming a dynamic and immersive visual syncopation. Vibrant sections of unmodulated colour run vertically and diagonally across the painted canvas—its chromatic boldness dating the present work to the artist’s punchy post-Egypt palette—and impart an illusory suggestion of ever-shifting pictorial depth. Daphne belongs to a series of paintings produced across a decade commencing in the late 1980s. These works produced a feeling of motion that broke away from Riley’s iconic vertical ‘stripe’ compositions of the early 1980s, through a concerted study of the diagonal’s visual impact. In Daphne colour oscillates between positive space and aperture, perpetually transformed in the eye of the viewer as it roams the painting’s radiant and dappled surface. Shortly after its execution, the work was included in two surveys of contemporary British art: The Experience of Painting, a travelling exhibition which opened at the South Bank Centre, London in 1989, and Glasgow’s Great British Art Exhibition at Glasgow’s historic McLellan Galleries in 1990.
The raking sight lines and irregular rhythm of the present work suggest an animate and self-propelling force. Riley has discussed the impact on her practice of childhood years spent in the coastal region of Cornwall. Her immediate experiences of nature have been pivotal: the shifting patterns inherent to waves which lap upon the shore, a flock of birds in flight, or vast wheatfields rippling in the breeze. ‘For me nature is not landscape but the dynamism of visual forces—an event rather than an appearance,’ Riley has said (B. Riley, ‘Working with Nature’, in R. Kudielka, ed., The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley Collected Writings 1965-1999, London 1973, p. 88). Through Riley’s eye nature is not looked at but rather abstracted and experienced, and it is with paintings such as Daphne that the artist captures this indefinable sensation of sight.
Riley titles her paintings retrospectively, naming them ‘according to their spirit’, and drawing on ‘memories of sensations in the past which have some sort of correspondence with those in the painting’ (B. Riley in conversation with A. Farquharson, in Bridget Riley: Recent Paintings and Gouaches, exh. cat. Waddington Galleries, London 1996, p. 11). She has often mined ancient mythologies for her titles, such as Achæan (1981, Tate) or Zephyr (1976, Manchester Art Museum), whose rippling surface evokes the titular Greek god of wind. Daphne, likewise, alludes to the Greek nymph transformed into a laurel tree as she fled the god Apollo. Its rich chromatic tapestry suggests shafts of orange sunlight on dappled foliage—the profusion of green ‘zips,’ as Riley refers to the small diagonal sections, recall the elegant, elongated ellipses of laurel leaves—through which flashes of a blue and white sky are glimpsed.
The year after Riley painted Daphne, she was asked to curate an Artist’s Eye exhibition at the National Gallery, London, a series of shows in which significant contemporary artists were invited to exhibit alongside works from museum’s collection which they found personally resonant. Increasingly concerned with the plasticity of painting, Riley looked to artists whom she identified as having used colour as a constructive element. One such example, Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1520-1523), helped her to consider how the viewer ‘reads’ a painting. Titian, Riley explains, ‘works through an intuitive logic of oppositions, distinguishing and simultaneously relating every inch of the canvas in a continuous web of contrasts, echoes, reversals, repetitions and inversions’ (B. Riley quoted in The Artist’s Eye: Bridget Riley, exh. cat. National Gallery, London 1989, p. 11). Daphne’s varicoloured abundance and enveloping layers of receding space conjure a similarly mesmerising optical effect.
The raking sight lines and irregular rhythm of the present work suggest an animate and self-propelling force. Riley has discussed the impact on her practice of childhood years spent in the coastal region of Cornwall. Her immediate experiences of nature have been pivotal: the shifting patterns inherent to waves which lap upon the shore, a flock of birds in flight, or vast wheatfields rippling in the breeze. ‘For me nature is not landscape but the dynamism of visual forces—an event rather than an appearance,’ Riley has said (B. Riley, ‘Working with Nature’, in R. Kudielka, ed., The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley Collected Writings 1965-1999, London 1973, p. 88). Through Riley’s eye nature is not looked at but rather abstracted and experienced, and it is with paintings such as Daphne that the artist captures this indefinable sensation of sight.
Riley titles her paintings retrospectively, naming them ‘according to their spirit’, and drawing on ‘memories of sensations in the past which have some sort of correspondence with those in the painting’ (B. Riley in conversation with A. Farquharson, in Bridget Riley: Recent Paintings and Gouaches, exh. cat. Waddington Galleries, London 1996, p. 11). She has often mined ancient mythologies for her titles, such as Achæan (1981, Tate) or Zephyr (1976, Manchester Art Museum), whose rippling surface evokes the titular Greek god of wind. Daphne, likewise, alludes to the Greek nymph transformed into a laurel tree as she fled the god Apollo. Its rich chromatic tapestry suggests shafts of orange sunlight on dappled foliage—the profusion of green ‘zips,’ as Riley refers to the small diagonal sections, recall the elegant, elongated ellipses of laurel leaves—through which flashes of a blue and white sky are glimpsed.
The year after Riley painted Daphne, she was asked to curate an Artist’s Eye exhibition at the National Gallery, London, a series of shows in which significant contemporary artists were invited to exhibit alongside works from museum’s collection which they found personally resonant. Increasingly concerned with the plasticity of painting, Riley looked to artists whom she identified as having used colour as a constructive element. One such example, Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1520-1523), helped her to consider how the viewer ‘reads’ a painting. Titian, Riley explains, ‘works through an intuitive logic of oppositions, distinguishing and simultaneously relating every inch of the canvas in a continuous web of contrasts, echoes, reversals, repetitions and inversions’ (B. Riley quoted in The Artist’s Eye: Bridget Riley, exh. cat. National Gallery, London 1989, p. 11). Daphne’s varicoloured abundance and enveloping layers of receding space conjure a similarly mesmerising optical effect.