Bridget Riley (1931 - ) - Pioneering figure in Op art

Bridget Riley was born in Norwood, London and grew up in Cornwall and Lincolnshire. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, attended Goldsmiths' College in 1949-1952, going onto the Royal College of Art in 1952-55, where her peers included Peter Blake and Frank Auerbach. In the early 1960’s Riley began to develop her Op Art style, often comprising black and white geometric patterns that investigate the vitality of vision and creating a disorientating effect on the eye.

Her first solo exhibition at Gallery One, London, was held in 1962, was followed by a second in 1963, for which Anton Ehrenzweig wrote the catalogue foreword. He also prepared a major critical essay on her art for Art International which helped secure her reputation. During this period Bridget Riley worked entirely with black and white, only introducing colour from 1966.

Early Career

Riley taught children for two years before joining the Loughborough School of Art, where she initiated a basic design course in 1959. She then taught at Hornsey School of Art and from 1962-64 at Croydon School of Art. She also worked for the J. Walter Thompson Group advertising agency from 1960, but gave up teaching and advertising agency work in 1964.

Art Career

In 1968 she won the International Prize for Painting, the first woman to do so, at the 34th Venice Biennale and in the same year, with Peter Sedgeley, helped set up SPACE, a scheme for organising artists' studios which came into operation in 1969.

Bridget Riley has an extensive worldwide appeal and audience, and her exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York originally drew international attention to her work. She has held several major retrospective exhibitions including two at the Hayward Gallery, one at the Serpentine Gallery and one at the Tate Gallery, London. In 2009 the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool mounted a major retrospective of Bridget Riley's drawings and paintings entitled 'Flashback' covering every period of her career from 1960.

Represented by the London dealer Karsten Schubert, Riley has work in all major galleries in the UK and across five continents. These include the Bournemouth & Poole College Collection, Tate Gallery, GoMA, Fitzwilliam Museum, MoMa, New York, Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, Harvard University Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, V&A, London.

Art Contributor and Supporter

Bridget Riley is a committee member of the National Art-Collections Fund an organisation that has helped save nearly one million works of art for Great Britain. Riley has been made a Companion of Honour and awarded a CBE in recognition for her services to art.

Sources: www.artbiogs.co.uk