Bridget Riley Flashback
An exhibition being held at the Walker Art Gallery, 25 September 2009 to 13 December 2009.
‘Ecclesia’ 1985, Bridget Riley Flashback. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London.
This major exhibition tracks the career of Bridget Riley, from her exciting beginnings in the early 1960s to the ambitious and powerful works of recent years.
Riley’s distinctive and optically vibrant paintings generate extraordinary sensations of movement, light and space. The exhibition includes eight large scale paintings, with four coming from Riley’s personal collection. Alongside these are around 30 drawings and studies that illuminate her working methods over her five-decade-long-career.
A seminal work in the show is 'Movement in Squares', which was purchased by the Arts Council collection in 1962, the year after it was made. Consistently exhibited in retrospectives of her work, she credits the work as the beginning of her breakthrough into abstraction. This shows an insight into the role of the Arts Council collection in supporting British artists and collecting the art treasures of the future.
Many of the works will be exhibited for the first time and the show is the first in a major new series of touring exhibitions from the Arts Council collection, Southbank Centre. Each venue on the tour has collected work by Riley, including the Walker, which has 'Sea Cloud' in its collections.
An illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition with new text by the artist that is a very personal account of her approach to making work.
A Hayward Touring Exhibition from the Southbank Centre. Copyright Bridget Riley. All rights reserved.
A film documenting the founding of SPACE studios set up by Bridget Riley and Peter Sedley can be viewed on the SPACE studios website.
