Fortescue & Oldfield loaned an important gouache, "23 September, Bassacs, 1996",
to the Yale Centre of British Art for Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction. The work was selected personally by Riley for inclusion in the exhibition.
Over a seven-decade career, Bridget Riley (b. 1931) has used color, line, and geometric pattern to explore the dynamic nature of visual perception in paintings, drawings, and screen prints. She first achieved international prominence in the early 1960s with her distinctive black-and-white paintings, their rhythmic lines and curves appearing to vibrate across the canvas. Since then, Riley has relied on deceptively simple shapes to startling effect. Working in series, the artist gradually expanded her palette, introducing gray tonal variations before shifting to vivid color juxtapositions. Riley's arresting paintings harness the disruptive and harmonious relationships among color, line, and form with compositions of remarkable complexity and vibrancy.
Selected by the artist and displayed on two floors, the works in this exhibition comprise the largest survey of Riley's work in the United States in twenty years. The show opens with an in-depth examination of Riley's seminal monochrome paintings of the 1960s on the third floor and presents the full range of her oeuvre in color on the second floor. Assembling Riley's most iconic paintings alongside rarely seen works, the exhibition traces the evolution of her deep engagement with the fundamentals of visual perception.
“Looking carefully at paintings is the best training you can have as a young painter,” Riley has said of her deep appreciation of the work of painters of the past. For this exhibition, she has selected an oil study by John Constable (1776–1837) from the Yale Center for British Art and a watercolor by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) from the Yale University Art Gallery to hang alongside her work.
Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction was conceived by the artist in collaboration with Courtney J. Martin (Yale PhD 2009), Paul Mellon Director, Yale Center for British Art, working with Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani, former Postdoctoral Research Associate, with the assistance of Martina Droth, Deputy Director and Chief Curator; Charlotte Lefland, Senior Curatorial Assistant, Prints and Drawings; and Rachel Stratton, Postdoctoral Research Associate.