Exhibition of the week Bridget Riley
Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (0131-624 6559, nationalgalleries.org). Until 22 September
Bridget Riley (b.1931) might just be Britain’s “greatest living artist”, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. She sprang to fame in the 1960s, with a series of “mind-bending” abstract paintings that incorporated “endless acres” of “stripes”, “curves” and “wavy lines”, and fitted in perfectly with the psychedelic fashions of the time. Having become a reluctant “It girl” of Swinging London art, she transcended the hype, and has continued to create astonishing, uncompromising paintings ever since. This new show at the Edinburgh art festival gives a snapshot of her “obsessive drive”, showing how she has created one of the most powerful bodies of work in modern art. Beginning with life drawings made while she was still at school, and tracing her eightdecade career right up to the present day, the exhibition brings together more than 80 paintings that by turns dazzle, disorientate and amaze. Seen together, they create a sense of “heroic uplift”.
This show presents a fascinating picture of how Riley’s style has evolved, said Laura Freeman in The Sunday Times. Early works are “pale” imitations of the 19th century pointillist paintings of Georges Seurat – but she soon develops her own artistic language.
Pink Landscape (1960) demonstrates some original ideas, but it is not until we get to 1964’s
Burn – “a dizzying punk’s houndstooth that jags from edge to edge” – that we get the “voltage shock” of classic Riley. Cataract 3 (1967) is another masterpiece of the era, all “giddy waves and squiffy stripes”. Later pictures are no less great: 2010’s Red
with Red Triptych has pillarbox-coloured shapes floating across the canvas “like silk scarves”; while Cascando
(2015) sees triangles running “amok”, making the image appear to “shimmy” before our eyes. And the only disappointments are her most recent paintings, featuring a “sludge and country cottage” palette and compositions that are too “polite” by half.
It’s extraordinary to learn how much planning goes into a Riley painting, said Jan Patience in The Herald. Documents written by the artist herself explain how “every single line and curve” has been mapped out in “microscopic” detail; an analysis of the 1985 work Rise 1, for example, fills fully seven pages of text. As it turns out, Riley draws inspiration from some rather unexpected sources: in several pictures, including
Rajasthan (2015) – a “vivid” image painted directly onto the gallery wall – she even tips her hat to graffiti. All this adds up to a “beezer” of an exhibition that “burns its way into your retinas and feeds your soul”.