Bridget Riley:Don't Believe the Stripes.

"In general, my paintings are multifocal. You can't call it unfocused space, but not being fixed to a single focus is very much of our time" - Bridget Riley.

 

Loss (1964)

Bridget Riley's current show at the Hayward Gallery on London's South Bank is exactly the kind of retrospective I'd suggested we were long overdue when I visited a much smaller show of her recent works at Mayfair's David Zwirner gallery in March of last year and it was just as good as I expected. No better. No worse.

Which is still very good. Before entering the show I was surprised to find that Riley had been born on Honor Oak Road in SE23 just a few doors from where I used to live. Though, as she was born in 1931, that was a long time before I lived there. A long time before I was born in fact.

Composition with Circles 4 (2004)

Now aged 88, nobody could deny that Riley has had a long career although there's still a feeling that her best work was made in the sixties and it's certainly that decade that has come to define her. This show went a short way to debunking that. I say 'short' because when I look at my favourites, like 1964's Loss, they were, of course, made in that much mythologised decade.

But there's more going on than groovy graphics and hippy ideals here. As you enter the Hayward you're confronted with a large number of open circles painted directly on to the wall and as there weren't many people there when I visited (including my friend Claire who was supposed to meet me to attend together but neither turned up nor even texted to say she wouldn't) there was plenty of space to stand back and take it all in.

More curious, however, was a small installation called Continuum which you had to queue up to go in. Only one person at a time and you had to leave your bag with an attendant (much to the unnecessary concern of one visitor) so as not to damage the piece. It's the only three-dimensional work Riley ever made and though it's fun, and very much in line with how you'd imagine a Bridget Riley 3D experience to be, the optical illusions you get from it are no more powerful than the ones you can find elsewhere here.

Continuum [Reconstruction] (1963/2005)

Riley has said the work was influenced by the vast curved Waterlily series painted by Claude Monet  and it shows us that, as will be confirmed later, she was not an artist out of nowhere but one who was very aware of art history and the pioneering modernists that preceded her.

Both in the figurative and in the abstract traditions. Whereas Impressionist painters would use strokes or dots to build up an image, Riley used them in their purest form. Or at least that's how it seemed. There's a kind of magic about her painting in that the way she's put the dots or stripes together causes our brains to make pictures (of sorts) out of them. We can see movement, oscillation, and blurring but, of course, it's not really there.

When, in 1967, she moved over to making colour paintings, something, I'd previously suspected, was lost. But this exhibition disabused me of that notion. Bridget Riley has said, correctly, that "you can never see colour by itself, it is always affected by other colours" and though that seems obvious in the work of someone like, say, Pierre Bonnard it would be easy to imagine that Riley's cool pastel shaded works, some look like deck chairs, would look the same whatever colour scheme had been applied.

Rise 1 (1968)

Paean (1973)

My photographs don't really do the works justice (if they did, we'd not need to visit art galleries, eh?) but, in situ, you really get a lovely feeling of the various colours either bleeding into each other or creating very clear lines or refusing to do so. More recent works (it's all relative) like November and Justinian have, looked at online or in books, confused me. They look a bit dated, like an early duvet cover or some floppy disk artwork, but, again, in the gallery situation and full size, they're a delight to the viewer's eye - even though they play less tricks on it.

November (1990)

Justinian (1988)

Late Morning (1967-8)

Ra (1981)

Which was fine. My peepers needed a rest anyway! Works like 1981's Ra, we're told, saw a shift from acrylic to oil paint (although they don't look that different to me) and there are also claims that they're inspired by ancient Egyptian culture which, again, is not something I'd have picked up on. 

While being won over by these vertical and horizontal straight line paintings, they still didn't make anything like the impression of the curvy stuff. Hey, I like curves! I can't help that. 

Riley kicked off with curves as far back as 1961 with Kiss. Kiss appears to me to still be in hock to artists like Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline but by the time the sixties really got swinging so did Riley. Works like Drift 2 and Arrest 3 are just pure joy to look at. The wavy lines confuse your eyes so much it's almost nautical. They have the cool ebb and flow of waves out at sea. It's remarkable that an artist can create such a vision from such a seemingly simple set of shapes and colours.

Kiss (1961)

Drift 2 (1966)

Arrest 3 (1965)

Aubade (1975)

Cataract 3 (1967)

Streak 2 (1979)

Clepsydra (1976)

Exposure (1966)

Rajasthan (Wall Painting) (2012)

Painting with Verticals 3 (2006)

By the seventies Riley was using the curve for what she called 'a rhythmic vehicle for colour' that would rise and fall in diagonal patterns and as the years went by the spatial fields of colour got larger, the curves got more firmly defined, and though they still look wonderful they don't monkey around with your vision in such an impressive way as paintings like Cataract 3 and Streak 2.

I'd written earlier that Riley had only made one 3D work in her career so far but the illusion of depth in these works is so powerful that it's almost hard to believe they're completely flat. As you move around them, they move with you.

Red with Red Triptych (2010)

This was all the kind of stuff I'd expected, and hoped, to see at the exhibition but there's a room devoted to Riley's studies and, far more interestingly for me, her early works. Paintings and drawings made before Riley moved into abstraction, including a group of works made during her time studying at Cheltenham Ladies College (1946-48), at Goldsmiths (1949-52), and at London's Royal College of Art (1952-55).

A lot of her training, we're informed, focused on life drawing from models and observations of the human body. She was hugely influenced by the likes of the aforementioned Pierre Bonnard as well as Henri Matisse and Paul Klee (Klee took a line for a walk, Riley took a line to the dance) but, perhaps more than anyone, it was Georges Seurat who gave Riley's future direction its impetus.

 

None of these early works are titled or dated but an information board nearby lets us know that Riley made her own larger version of Seurat's The Bridge at Courbevoie (1886-87) in 1959 and it was from him that she found a way of using colour to create light. It was also, through looking at and copying Seurat's work, that Riley realised the viewer of the artwork wasn't a bystander but a participant in it. Our brains are deciphering Seurat's pointillist dots into figurative imagery just as they interpret Riley's triangles, curves, and lines into optical illusions and spaces that remain hard to pin down.

"The basis of my paintings is this:that in each of them a particular situation is stated. Certain elements within that situation remain constant. Others precipitate the destruction of themselves by themselves" - Bridget Riley.

As I returned downstairs to the final few rooms of the show I was confronted with works from both the very start of Riley's 'proper' career as an artist and some of her most recent work. The juxtaposition was not stark but it was clear. 2014's Quiver and 1962's Tremor could almost be part of the same series but there's a big leap from sixties works like Where, Pause, and Fission to 2017's Measure for Measure 3 and 2019's Interval 2.

Quiver 3 (Wall Painting) (2014)

Tremor (1962)

Where (1964)

Pause (1964)

Fission (1963)

Current (1964)

Black to White Discs (1962)

Blaze 1 (1962)

Static 4 (1966)

I would have to concede, like a boring music snob, that I prefer the early stuff! There's some words about what colours Riley has used over the years and why but the point of Bridget Riley's work (any artist's) is less to read about it and more to interact with it. The Hayward Gallery had not gone overboard with information so that visitors to this exhibition could do just that and by leaving plenty of space and including work covering EIGHT decades nobody could claim it wasn't a thorough retrospective.

I liked all of it and a large part of it I loved. Bridget Riley from Honor Oak Road, Forest Hill done good for herself.

Measure for Measure 13 (2017)

Intervals 2 (2019)