Over her incredibly longevous career—she first became famous at the start of the 1960s as a leading exponent of Op art—Bridget Riley has developed her paintings through the arrangement of simple forms: stripes, triangles, circles and ovals, rhomboids and curves. She explores the rules of perception with colors and rhythms, inspired by theories and painting practices from Egypt to post-Impressionism. Her art is nevertheless an utterly contemporary laboratory, starting from formal experiments and exactly defined hues. Beyond the window format of the canvas, since the late 1970s she has been creating wall paintings, engendering a direct communication between work, viewer, and space. In an exceptional show at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin, thirteen of these wall paintings across forty years were brought together: dot paintings, stripe paintings, and complex shapes whose inner logic resists a quick glance. The exhibition is documented in work illustrations and installation views that give a sense of the polyrhythms across the walls. An essay by Éric de Chassey discusses this central genre in Riley ’s work, Michael Bracewell visits the artist for a look at her recent work, and Robert Kudielka provides the biographical context. Two historical interviews and a reflection by Riley herself round out the book.

A NEW FORMAT
(excerpt from the essay by Éric de Chassey)

Through decades of experimentation, Riley has invented an extraordinarily rich new artistic format: wall works, which differ from easel paintings, murals or decorations (even if they can be used as decorations). Their autonomous nature has allowed Riley to bring together two very different special areas in a wide selection of her wall works in the exhibition, Bridget Riley: Wall Works 1983–2023, at Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin, enabling the viewer to see and understand how each of them – self-contained even when placed on the same wall as others – constitutes a step in a continuous process of ‘learning to see’. As the artist says: ‘You learn to see, you lay aside some ways of past seeing, you acquire new ways of seeing, it’s a developing activity and that is what is enjoyable.’ Each of Riley’s wall works addresses different issues and uses different means, but also partakes in the contemporaneous continuation of the millennium-long tradition of artists describing or creating places of delight, metaphorical or literal.

This tradition does not have a single identity but embraces the notion of locus amoenus forged by Latin poets, the pictorial genre of pastoral or Arcadian landscape. It finds one of its roots in the tomb paintings of ancient Egypt, which describe places where a pleasant life goes on, that unites men, women and the gods, human actions and interactions, and nature – and it is fitting that Riley’s first endeavours in the realm of decoration took their inspiration from those tombs. It continues in the paintings of cultivated nature that adorned the houses and palaces of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, where architectural elements interact with a domesticated flora and fauna. It is revived in the pastoral landscapes that depict the human or mythological activities harmoniously pursued in nature, a genre initiated by Giorgione and Titian, renewed by Poussin, Claude and Constable, and adapted by Cézanne, Monet, Seurat, Bonnard and Matisse – all artists for whom Riley has frequently expressed admiration.

Lawrence Gowing noted that the ‘pastoral is the art of relationship, the art both of the human relationship, which the subjects discover, and the interrelation of visual elements’, emphasising that ‘the meaning of pastoral landscape resides in the human reference, but not necessarily on the presence of the figures’.62 Riley herself has made clear that she does not try to represent nature but is ‘working towards nature’, foregoing any depiction: ‘I start from my materials, from the colours and forms, although eventually I may recognise in them particular relationships, sensations somehow familiar from nature’63 (‘that is how I know if they are good or bad’, she later elaborated). But the kind of visual places she creates are akin to the tradition that I have just described, as she recognises that ‘within the things [she is] doing, there is leisure, there is an ebb and a flow, a rhythm which takes into account both the need for repose, and the need for activity’.

This is true of all her work since the 1960s and it is even truer of her wall works. Their sheer size and scale make them fields through which the eye can roam, exploring a variety of visual rhythms that induce physical responses, disturbance and poise. They differ from the works on canvas or on paper where, although in a marginal way, a strict separation is retained between the pictorial surface and the space which welcomes it. Riley’s wall works are contiguous with the world. They don’t ‘destroy’ the walls where they are installed (as she had wished in 1964) but rather put them to work, as they in turn put their viewers to work, inviting them to discover, in a state of ‘separate emotional liberation’ that may be felt as the essence of pastoral landscape65, how joy and freedom can still be experienced in today’s world, not denying the contradictory and contrasting elements in the midst of which we live, but using them instead to create overall harmony. Walls are usually meant to create enclosure and exclusion; when transformed by Riley, they become places of jubilation and openness.

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