“Perception is the medium. In it is located the creation of new forms of life”
Bridget Riley (b. 1931, London, England) defined the visual language of Op Art in the 1960s, transforming geometric abstraction into a deeply psychological experience. Her early black-and-white paintings, marked by precision and optical dynamism, became icons of the Op Art movement which challenged how viewers see and interpret the flat picture plane. Drawing upon her own perceptual experiences rather than formal color theory or mathematical systems, Riley pursued a singular vision that explores the instability of perception, the mutability of color, and the relationship between structure and sensation.
Born in Norwood, London, and educated at Goldsmiths’ College and the Royal College of Art, Riley began her career painting in a semi-Impressionist style, later embracing Pointillism before finding her style of abstraction in 1960. From that point on, she developed an art that is both rigorously constructed and deeply intuitive.
Riley’s style emerged through a meticulous study of artists such as Georges Seurat and Piet Mondrian. She sought to expand their investigation of optical experience. As she explained, her goal was "to dismember, to dissect, the visual experience." In her early paintings, Riley introduced sharply delineated black-and-white forms that seem to flicker, lively in their apparent pulsations. These early compositions activated the shallow pictorial space inherited from Mondrian and Abstract Expressionism, yet with an intensity that animated the canvas.
From these foundational experiments in the early 1960s, Riley began to interrogate the dynamics of figure and ground, light and dark, foreground and background—often making it impossible to tell which dominates. She did not privilege illusion for its own sake; rather, she sought to stimulate imagination and invite introspection—a testament to the power of optical juxtaposition.
In 1967, Riley introduced color into her work with a series titled Cataract. These paintings marked the beginning of her engagement with chromatic relationships. She claimed that “color is never pure,” and that its dynamism depends on surrounding hues. Stripes—which she claimed are “unassertive forms”—became her primary means of expressing the potentials of color. This exploration of color culminated in a presentation at the 1968 Venice Biennale, where she became the first British artist—and woman—to win the International Prize for Painting.
Influenced by her travels in Egypt in 1981, Riley expanded her color palette even further, embracing the vibrancy of ancient color systems and exploring freer arrangements. These later works, rhythmical in their variations, continued to challenge the boundaries of perception and defy the presumed stasis of painting.
Riley’s influence has been profound—on visual culture, on design, and on generations of artists exploring the interplay of sensation and structure. Riley insists on the personal, subjective nature of her process, eschewing the “mechanical” connotations often attached to Op Art. With each work, she invites the viewer not simply to look but to feel sight itself. Her legacy is one of relentless innovation and poetic precision—where the eye is never passive.