Brilliant Power
Andrew Lamb irth
Bridget Riley
Tate Britain until 28 September
Atr Millbank is currently one of the best etrospective exhibitions I've seen — an eloquent selection of paintings consummately displayed. The artist to be so favoured is Bridget Riley (born 1931), and we can be sure that she herself has worked hard to achieve this immaculate presentation, in partnership with the highly skilled Tate curators. Riley is an artist of the utmost dedication and rigour, who has been at the top of her profession for more than 40 years. A constant innovator in the region of abstract 'optical' art, she was the first British contemporary artist, and first woman, to win the International Prize for painting, at the Venice Biennale of 1968. Now in her 70s, her work is as fresh and inventive as ever, as can be seen in the last room of this exhibition.
Riley's paintings are destabilising but exciting: canyons down which the eye slithers, over vertiginous drops and down spirals which fray at the edge of vision. The visual tensions Riley creates are not easy to contemplate, but they are rewarding and essentially life-enhancing. As she has written, The pleasures of sight have one characteristic in common — they take you by surprise. They are sudden, swift and unexpected. If one tries to prolong them, recapture them or bring them about wilfully, their purity and freshness is lost. They are essentially enigmatic and elusive.' For these reasons, Riley decided not to attempt to depict things seen in the real world, but to make instead painted metaphors, visual equivalents, that provided similar pleasures and disturbances. In this she has triumphantly succeeded.
The first room of this exhibition contains a vast new work, a large wall drawing of circles, a complex repetitive structure in black and white (Riley first made her name without using colour), which is backed up by key works from the 1960s, including a spot painting to remind us that Riley did it long before Hirst, and much better. This is the room through which the visitor also exits, giving a cyclical emphasis to the exhibition, and thus investing it with a remarkable sense of renewal. This is something one feels throughout the exhibition, particularly in the presence of such fine small paintings as 'Shift', 'Shiver' and 'Turn' of 1963-64, the flights of triangles progressing through them like migrating geese.
These early paintings are much about movement, so that when you walk past them they change: the shapes retreating or coming forward, bulging or diminishing, or swaying like a lace curtain in a breeze. But soon these rich black-and-white pictures were to be invested with colour, Three powerful zigzag paintings in the third room, 'Descending', 'Blaze 1' and 'Climax', illustrate this. They are still painted in black emulsion on white-painted hardboard, but colour is there all right. As the eye is chivvied about the spinning arrangements of black lines, never allowed to rest, yellow and pink and mauve spark off the retina, Green and blue lurk in the shadows. Inevitably, it would not be long before painted colour entered the fray. In 'Chant 2', of 1967, alternate red and blue verticals sizzle down a large, nearly square canvas — if straight lines can be said to sizzle. From here on, the colours are more overt and clamorous, striped like fabrics (and don't forget that Riley was once grievously plagiarised by the fashion designers of New York), with a couple of bold diagonal arrangements further to flutter the eye. The predominantly green-andwhite 'Veld' also contains slim lines of lilac and orange to deepen its optical effect, while 'Rattle' consists of horizontal strips of diagonals in red and blue, red and green, like herringbone gone wrong.
There is not space here to wax lyrical about all of these brilliant chromatic orchestrations (though I certainly feel like it), but certain conjunctions and nice pieces of hanging should be noted. For instance, the juxtaposition of the dark and bright horizontals of 'Apprehend' with the jazzier but related vertical rhythms in the Tate's own `Cantus Firmus' of 1972-73. And the room of subtle wave-pattern pictures — up and down, back and forth — in the pinks and browns and greens and blues and lilacs of undulating heathland. Another room is densely hung with a selection of 40 years' worth of preparatory studies — 75 pieces demonstrating what richness pours forth from Riley's rigorous simplification, from her graph-paper plottings.
Among the later works, I particularly liked the juxtaposition of the bellying curves of 'Lagoon 1' with the hot rectilinear pinks and mauves of 'Harmony in Rose I', both from 1997. But perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the whole exhibition is the joyous last room of recent curve paintings, which represent a major new development in Riley's work. If they recall
late Matisse cut-outs, this is indeed appropriate because they are presumably made in a very similar way. Riley orchestrates her forms in cut and coloured paper, and settles on the design in a kind of collage version, before the paintings are executed to her exact plans by assistants. Six paintings, two of them very big, and all of them made during the last four years, weave a marvellous dancing rhythm around the walls. Entirely abstract, they yet evoke images from the perceived world: fish, tongues of fire, nymphs in glades, entwined lovers, the light on the ocean. These are paintings of swift and sensuous colour: an artist working at the height of her powers.
Previous page
