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“To quote George Orwell: every artist ‘has a ‘message’...”

Interview with the Author: Christian Viveros-Fauné 

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The Bridget Riley Art Foundation and Thames & Hudson are pleased to announce the release of 

Weighing nearly 50 lbs, this expansive catalogue assembles 

’s remarkable oeuvre for the first time. Designed by Tim Harvey, 

has been edited by art historian and critic Robert Kudielka, who has known the artist since 1967 and is a leading expert on her work, along with Riley’s archivists Alexandra Tommasini and Natalia Nash.

The publication is spread across five volumes that span specific periods in the artist’s career: 1959 to 1973, 1974 to 1997, 1998 to 2009, 2009 to 2017, and early work from 1946 to 1958. More than 650 color illustrations explore works made on canvas, board, and the wall, as well as major large-scale commissions. Drawing on Riley’s historic archive of large-format transparencies, contemporary photography, and newly commissioned photographs by Anna Arca, this compendium includes many works that have never before been published, and demonstrates the artist’s active engagement with color over more than half a century.

"Through details you see the scale these paintings have," Kudielka says, "a sense of what is in front of you when you see a real painting." In lush spreads, close-ups of color sequences from the works are reproduced at their actual size. "I wanted the books to be attractive in themselves," Harvey, who has designed over a dozen 

 of Riley’s work, explained, "but they also had to work as an accessible resource. I was keen to make good use of the archive of photographs of Bridget from the 1950s to the present day [Volume 5], to show her working environments and how various photographers, including J.S. Lewinski and [Lord] Snowdon, have portrayed her so compellingly."

The box set’s color scheme is informed by Riley’s current exhibition at 

 in Marfa, Texas, where a large-scale, site-specific wall painting employs a palette inspired by a visit she made to Egypt in 1980. "I had been closely involved with the installation of 

 in Marfa, so the ‘Egyptian palette’ of colors was very much on my mind—turquoise, yellow, blue, red, black, and white," Harvey said. "At a meeting in Bridget’s London garden last summer, it was decided to print something on the cover cloths rather than just use a standard cloth—so once we got as far as needing five volumes and a slipcase, the opportunity arose to use the Egyptian colors." The slipcase also features the iconic 1961 painting 

provides an unprecedented view of the artist’s monumental body of work.

In addition to the wall painting at Chinati Foundation, Riley’s work is currently on view in 

Bridget Riley: Paintings from the 1960s to the Present

at Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Sakura through August 26, 2018. Featuring more than thirty works, ranging from black and white pieces created in the 1960s to recent wall paintings, the exhibition is the first major institutional presentation of the artist’s work in Japan since 1980. Riley’s critically acclaimed 

 at David Zwirner London this winter presented works spanning 2014 to 2017.

UK Release Date: June 28; US Release Date: July 28

Bridget Riley: The Complete Paintings

On view across both floors of the Scottish National Gallery, 

 presents more than seventy years of work demonstrating 

’s dedication to the interaction of form and color and its influence on human perception; as Riley wrote in an essay titled "The Pleasures of Sight" in 1984, which is reprinted in the catalogue for this exhibition, "Long before I ever saw a major painting … I had been fortunate enough to discover what ‘looking’ can be—sometimes in a mere glance one can see more than in the close scrutiny of a thousand details.… I discovered that I was painting in order to ‘make visible.’"

The selection of works on view at the Scottish National Gallery places particular emphasis on the beginnings of Riley’s practice through early works on paper—many of which have never been shown publicly before. Highlights among some fifty paintings being presented will be 

 (1960), attesting to Riley’s long-standing engagement with the work of Georges Seurat—who, as she wrote in 1992, "looks into perception … by holding up a sort of mirror." Riley’s interaction with Seurat’s work dates back to her early training as an artist, when she copied Seurat’s 

 (1884) at The National Gallery in London. Other important works from the 1960s include her first abstract paintings, 

 (1968) are pivotal works that were first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1968, where Riley became the first contemporary British painter to win the International Prize for painting.

Riley’s investigation of color is traced in this show through early examples of her stripe paintings and "curve" paintings of the 1970s like 

 (1981) mark her return to striped compositions using what the artist has called her "Egyptian" palette of blue, red, yellow, green, black, and white, which was inspired by a visit to Egypt in 1980. These colors are also used in a mural titled 

Royal Liverpool University Hospital, 1983, as wall painting, Bolt of Colour

, currently on view at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. The most recent works in the Scottish National Gallery show include the black and white painting 

, a recent series of disc paintings, both of which featured in Riley’s 

 at David Zwirner in London last year. Colored discs are also used in a wall painting titled 

 that went on view at The National Gallery in London in January 2019.

Following its presentation at the Scottish National Gallery, Bridget Riley will travel to the 

 in London, where it will be shown from October 23, 2019, through January 26, 2020. The London exhibition features new wall paintings made specifically for the Hayward Gallery. The exhibitions are accompanied by a major new publication that includes new and archival texts by writers such as Robert Kudielka, who has written extensively on Riley’s work, and David Sylvester, whose review of the artist’s first solo exhibition (at Gallery One in London in 1962) is reprinted in the book. Noting "an unusually good first one-man show," Sylvester describes an element in Riley’s work that is "not only imaginative in conception but has the sort of rightness in its placing that a good actor has in his timing—it seems at once unexpected and inevitable."

June 15–September 22, 2019

Bridget Riley

 will be unveiled today at The National Gallery in London. Titled 

, the mural spans ten by twenty meters (approximately thirty-three by sixty-six feet) inside the museum’s Annenberg Court, an interior space connecting the Level 2 galleries with visitor facilities on the ground floor and the Getty Entrance; upon entering the gallery from Trafalgar Square, the mural will be one of the first artworks encountered. To date, the artist has completed a number of site-specific murals, beginning in 1983 with a commission for the Royal Liverpool University Hospital that recently inspired a new wall work at 

Large colored discs in The National Gallery mural are based on recent wall paintings and works on canvas presented in the artist’s 2018 

 at David Zwirner in London. While new to Riley’s lexicon, the motif of the disc has its basis in the artist’s 

paintings from 1966, which feature gridded circular forms. Painted directly on the walls of The National Gallery, the discs float, cloudlike, against a white background. The title 

 is inspired by a phrase the British painter John Constable (1776–1837) used when referring to clouds, which feature prominently in the landscapes for which he is best known. Fascinated by the effects of weather on light and atmosphere, Constable called himself "the man of clouds" in a letter to John Fisher in 1823.

Although abstract, Riley’s work is also grounded in observation of the natural world, which she understands in terms of "the dynamism of visual forces—an event rather than an appearance." In a text written by the artist in 1984 called "The Pleasures of Sight," Riley describes her childhood discovery of "what ‘looking’ can be" as a crucial foundation for her artistic practice: "Changing seas and skies, a coastline ranging from the grand to the intimate …; what I experienced there [in Cornwall, UK] formed the basis of my visual life.… Swimming through the oval, saucer-like reflections, dipping and flashing on the sea surface, one traced the colours back to the origins.… Some came directly from the sky and different coloured clouds, some from the golden greens of the vegetation growing on the cliffs, some from the red-orange of the seaweed on the blues and violets of adjacent rocks, and, all between, the actual hues of the water."

 also takes as a point of departure the work of Georges Seurat (1859–1891), who has been an important influence on Riley’s continued exploration of perception through the interaction of form and color. As Riley wrote in 1992, "Seurat looks 

perception … by holding up a sort of mirror; and what we see is ourselves looking." Riley’s interaction with Seurat’s work in The National Gallery collection dates back to her early training as an artist, when she copied Seurat’s 

(1884). For Daniel Herrmann, The National Gallery’s curator of special projects, 

"acts as a bridge between the Old Masters in our collection and contemporary art.” Riley served as a trustee of the gallery for several years and 

 its collection as having been “a guiding star” throughout her career, “its pictures like a compass, sources of instruction and inspiration."

Riley is to have a major retrospective at the 

 in June this year; the show will travel to the Hayward Gallery in October 2019.

Bridget Riley: Recent Paintings 2014–2017

, David Zwirner, London, 2017

Cover Image: Bridget Riley with 

The National Gallery, London

New Mural by Bridget Riley

"Britain’s greatest abstract painter—some might say our greatest living artist period—has remained a resolute enigma. You can look in vain at Riley’s paintings—with their endless acres of stripes, curves and what, for want of a better term, we’ll call wavy lines—for the slightest detail concerning her life or personality. What does become every apparent, however, in her biggest exhibition in Scotland to date (and one of her largest anywhere) is her obsessive drive to draw the absolute maximum—the universal, in fact—from the relatively limited set of visual ideas she has made her territory. And it’s been that way, it seems, from the very beginning.

Comprising 81 prime works, spanning eight decades, from her early preoccupation with the French pointillist Georges Seurat through her pivotal op art period to works created by the 88-year-old painter only last year, it begins with a surprise, hidden away in an underground gallery where you could easily miss it: an array of Riley’s earliest works, starting with life drawings done while she was a pupil at Cheltenham Ladies College. There’s nothing juvenile about these works. Riley’s rigour and instinct to probe into visual form are already evident in these highly competent, very traditional drawings."

Read On

"Eye-scrambling insights into the workings of a truly great artist"

eye scrambling insights into the workings of a truly great artist

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.