In ihrem langen und fruchtbaren Schaffen – sie wurde Anfang der 1960er-Jahre als führende Vertreterin der Op-Art bekannt – hat Bridget Riley ihre Bilder durch Konstellationen einfacher Formen entwickelt: Streifen, Dreiecke, Kreise und Ovale, Rauten und Kurven. Sie erforscht die Regeln der Wahrnehmung in Farben und Rhythmen, inspiriert von Theorien und Malpraktiken von Ägypten bis zum Postimpressionismus. Ihre Kunst ist dabei ein ganz und gar zeitgenössisches Laboratorium, das von formalen Experimenten und genau definierten Farbtönen ausgeht. Seit Ende der 1970er-Jahre lässt sie mitunter das Fensterformat der Leinwand in Wandgemälden hinter sich, die Werk, Betrachter und Raum in direkten Dialog bringen. Bei einer außergewöhnlichen Schau der Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin wurden 13 dieser Wandbilder aus 40 Jahren zusammengeführt: Punktbilder, Streifenbilder und komplexe Formen, deren innere Logik sich einem schnellen Blick entzieht. Dokumentiert wird die Ausstellung durch Werkabbildungen und Installationsansichten, welche die Polyrhythmik an den Wänden erfahrbar machen. Ein Essay von Éric de Chassey beschreibt die zentrale Stellung dieses Mediums in Rileys Werk, Michael Bracewell besucht die Künstlerin und begegnet ihren jüngsten Werken, Robert Kudielka liefert den biografischen Kontext. Zwei historische Interviews und ein kurzer Essay von Riley selbst komplettieren den Band.

A NEW FORMAT
(Auszug aus dem Essay von 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’.

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