Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley is an English painter whose geometric works use repeated shapes, lines, and colors to produce sensations of movement and visual instability.

Movement in Squares: A 1961 black-and-white painting by Bridget Riley in which a regular grid appears to buckle and move. Its warped squares turn a simple grid into one of Riley’s clearest demonstrations of visual motion.
Optical art: An art movement that uses visual patterns to create perceptual effects such as motion, depth, and flicker. Riley is one of its best-known artists, though her work extends beyond its early black-and-white phase.
Goldsmiths, University of London: A London university whose art school has educated many influential British artists. Riley studied at its art school before developing her mature abstract work.
The Responsive Eye: A 1965 Museum of Modern Art exhibition that presented optical effects in contemporary art. Riley’s inclusion made her work central to the exhibition’s public definition of Op art.
Wassily Kandinsky: A Russian-born painter and theorist whose abstract works used color and form to express spiritual ideas. Riley’s paintings avoid the symbolic and spiritual meanings Kandinsky assigned to abstraction.
Fall: A 1963 black-and-white painting by Bridget Riley composed of curved, descending lines. Its repeated curves make the painted surface seem to ripple downward.
Visual perception: The processes by which the brain interprets information received through the eyes. Riley’s patterns exploit how vision organizes edges, repetition, and contrast.
Georges Seurat: A French Neo-Impressionist painter known for constructing images from small, distinct touches of color. Riley’s study of Seurat’s color relationships helped inform her later investigations of optical interaction.
Museum of Modern Art: A New York museum devoted to modern and contemporary art. Its 1965 exhibition helped turn Riley’s optical paintings into an international sensation.
Abstract expressionism: A postwar art movement associated with large-scale abstraction and expressive, gestural mark-making. Riley’s carefully planned repetitions oppose the movement’s emphasis on visible gesture and spontaneity.

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