THE BVRLINGTON MAGAZINE

Bridget Riley. London

Author(s): Lynne Cooke
Source: The Burlington Magazine, Sep., 2003, Vol. 145, No. 1206, Artists Abroad (Sep.,
2003), pp. 659-660
Published by: (PUB) Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.

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Exhibition Reviews
Bridget Riley
London qO i,
by LYNNE COORE, Dia Center for the Arts, New York
Bs
WM Bb
“NOTHING IMPORTANT REALLY gets lost”:
the truth of Bridget Riley's maxim is attest-
mr> Qi
ed to in multiple ways in the current exhi-
bition at Tate Britain, London (to 28th '
September), spanning the artist's forty-year
career.” Hindsight makes evident the
coherence and cohesion that result from her
returning afresh to certain abiding percep-
tual and formal concerns over this extended
period. Although her work falls into quite
distinct groupings, such as the early black-
and-white, so-called Op paintings for
which she was first heralded, or the later
Egyptian series from the 1980s, its palette 44. Arrest 2, by
defined by the hues used for over three Bridget Riley.

Q
thousand years in tomb paintings in the
Nile Valley, in retrospect the rigorous deci-
sion-making that underpins each shift in her
evolution comes to seem at once compre-
hensible, logical, almost pre-ordained:
continual unfolding centred in perceptual
experience.
The masterly layout of the show rein-
forces this impression of a relentless mining
of a rich seam of recurrent preoccupations.
The galleries are laid out in an unbroken
circuit, a chronological unfolding forwards
from the early 1960s, that ultimately
deposits the spectator back at the point of
departure. (It is, of course, equally possible
to journey backwards through the exhibi-
tion, unravelling the «euvre from its latest
to its earliest manifestations.) Several key
examples from her first mature body of
work, black-and-white abstractions gener-
ating an intense retinal impact, are included
in what is the first, and last, and largest,
gallery in the exhibition. White discs 2
(1964), a small painting made of variously
sized black circles deployed in a geometric
1965. Acrylic on
linen, 194 by 192
cm. (Nelson-Atkins
Museum of Art,
Kansas City; exh.
a Tate Britain,
London).
configuration over a pristine white ground, and directly opposite the entrance/exit,
produces the images for which it is titled Composition with circles 3 (2003), Riley's
as after-images. This optical illusion occurs newest work, offers a fitting climax to
in the space between the viewer and the these early forays, while at the same time
painting surface. With its interlocking appearing extraordinarily fresh and current.
rapier-edged shafts, Breathe (1966) oscillates The third in a remarkable trio of wall paint-
dramatically between positive and negative ings comprised of circles limned in black
readings, undermining any fixed relation across a white wall, this variant, like its
between figure and ground, thereby dis- predecessors, is carefully calibrated to the
solving the unified pictorial surface into a dimensions of'its site — to its surface, to the
piercing vibrant light. Given its broad scale of the room, and even to the principal
horizontal format, Exposure (1966) is one of vantage points from which it is encoun-
Riley's first paintings in which undulating tered, including the entrances from the
rhythms course across a vast surface, trans- adjacent galleries. The circles meet, overlap
forming this planar expanse into a mes- and join into rolling waves that are inter-
merising field of jolting flashes and fugitive rupted and overtaken by other movements
flares. Situated at the heart of this gallery and complexes of arcs and spheres in a

A
43. Two reds, by Bridget Riley, 2000. Linen, 129.5 by 305.5 cm. (PaceWildenstein, New York; exh. Tate Britain, London).

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BURLINGTON MAGAZINE
1
» CXLV « SEPTEMBER 2003 659
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
III
SU
III
45. Rattle, by
FzvCPLRUL_ A
RU
Bridget Riley.
1973. Acrylic
on linen, 153.3 UCCCCCc CcCCcCYe
by 381.3 cm.
(Private Qu CccCCcOOGTCTCYTS
QOOMLMUMN OSS LRC
collection; exh.
Tate Britain,
London).
composition too elaborate to be easily
comprehended yet irresistibly absorbing,
inviting reverie.
Further flanking this compelling site-
specific composition are two paintings,
each ina lateral gallery, each centred on the
doorway leading from the entrance room
(and the exit): Arrest 2 (1965;
be read as a foil and counterpart to Tiwo
reds (2000; Fig.43). Once again the two
paintings are separated by almost forty
years. The presupposition is that they, too,
while superficially unlike are not unrelated.
Arrest 2 marks the introduction into Riley's
vocabulary of twisting ribbon-like forms
running the full height of the canvas. Its
subtly complex structure is not based in
nurrored symmetries or reiterated structural
modalities but on two quite discrete yet
overlaid systems, one involving tonal grada-
tion, the other in echoing yet varying
curvatures. These two systems are subtly *
interlaced in ways that are complicated yet
visually immediate, limpidly clear yet resis-
tant to verbal explication. That is, while it is
relatively easy to describe their components
it is far more difficult to analyse how they
work, and the optical effects they create.
Two reds is similarly grounded in a
complex structuring but one that now
incorporates as crucial components caesuras
and shifts along its key diagonal axes. These
breaks and fractures render the underlying
linear scaffolding less immediately legible.
In addition, the multifarious
are no longer regular, repeated elements but
distinctive singular shapes that do not, how-
ever, take on an individualised character. In
Riley's earlier work, the formal interplay
generated perceptual effects that were not
abstracted from the world at large but built
from abstractions — of line, colour, shape,
etc. — into sensations that mirror or parallel
perceptual experiences generated in the
natural world. Something radically different
characterises Riley's latest body of work, of
which Two reds is exemplary.
In what is the first sustained analysis
devoted to this recent body of work,
Robert Kudielka, Riley's most seasoned
GGO SEPTEMBER 2003 + CXLV » THE
" .
_a
ION SC CD
advocate, coins the term “abstract figura-
tion” to characterise its new kinds of
dynamic spatial elations based in a complex
linear structuring subtending forms defined
in a narrowly restricted chromatic range.
He parses the interplay between the elusive
graphic armature and the finely tuned
Fig.44) can coloured shapes by reference to certain
precedents in the art of the past, namely, to
works by Poussin, Titian and Matisse,
among others. In place of reference to
experiences in nature, allusions are now
made to art-historical prefigurations, that is,
to representations of the human body in
motion.? In addition Kudielka, like others
who have written on these paintings, turns
to music as the most suitable analogy to
chart the dominant feature, the rhythmic
unfoldings. Arguably the most incisive
explicator of her work, the artist herself has
said little to suggest that this group of paint-
ings marks any significant re-orientation in
her thinking. Her few comments to date
focus primarily on the specifics of making,
on composing and structuring. By placing
the latest and most challenging body of
Riley's work for the first time in relation to
the full span of her practice, this impressive
retrospective challenges the visitor to deter-
mine how these paintings may be integrat-
ed into her trenchantly honed aesthetic,
how radically they depart from it, and how
such a departure is to be articulated.
Richard ShifPs insightful discussion of
components the contending concepts of illusion and
illusionism as they pertain to Riley's art
and, more generally, to contemporary
painting in the 1960s, does not pursue the
issues into the present, nor does he suggest
that they could be so pursued. Perhaps
Arrest 2 and Two reds do not so much flank
the central opening gallery (and the works
it contains ranging across her career) as hold
it in parentheses. In so doing they set up a
dialectical tension based in opposition, in'
antinomies rather than in affinity. They
suggest that, in addition to a continuous
narrative trajectory threading one body of
work to the next, other more contradictory
itineraries might be proposed.
BURLINGTON MAGAZINE
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One further dimension to Riley's maxim
that nothing important is ever finally relin-
quished may be garnered from this selection
of some seventy paintings (plus numerous
drawings, studies and sketches, all hung,
Salon style, in a single room located some
two-thirds of the way through the show).
Alongside such seminal pictures as Move-
ment in Squares (1961), Cataract 3 (1967),
Orient 4 (1970), Paean (1973) and Song of
Orpheus 5 (1978), a number of lesser-
own, more maverick works have been
included, notably Apprehend (1970) and
Rattle (1973; Fig.45). Hindsight renders
such incidental works tangential, in that
they seem to have opened paths not pur-
sued and avenues that, to date, might be
identified as culs-de-sac. Their presence not
only attests to the fertility of her exceeding-
ly agile and curious eye's mind — or mind's
eye — but troubles the seamlessness of her
endeavour as it is conventionally outlined
(and formalised in smaller, tighter, survey
shows).? If indeed nothing does get lost,
only transformed, then there remains much
to anticipate from this most focused and
sophisticated of visual intelligences.
' Catalogue: Bridget Riley. Edited by Paul Moor-
house, with essays by Paul Moorhouse, Richard Shiff
and Robert Kudielka. 244 pp. incl. 97 col. pls. + 20
b. & w. ills. (Tate Publishing, London, 2003), £35
(HB). ISBN 1-85437—492-3; £24.99 (PB). ISBN 1-
854374559.
2 When discussing the smaller works, Kudielka
invokes vegetal comparisons based, exceptionally, on
visual resemblance — a mode of reference hitherto
eschewed by Riley. For the most part, as in Tiwo reds,
the tides of this group of recent works refer to
dominant colours, while Parade, like a proposed but
quickly rejected allusion to bacchanalia, conjures
figures in motion and the Tate's Evoé 3 (2003) is a
Bacchantes' cry of revelry, Names as metaphors of
this latter kind are more characteristic of this scrupu-
lously meticulous artist.
3 Paul Moorhouse offers a thoughtful survey of the
principal stages in Riley's career without, however,
speculating on these byways. For more abbreviated
versions of Riley's eeuvre, see exh. cat. Bridget Riley:
Paintings from the 1960s and 19705, London (Serpentine
Gallery) 1999, and exh. cat. Bridget Riley: Reconnais-
sance, New York (Dia Center for the Arts) 2000.