Bridget Riley

Bridget Louise Riley (born 24 April 1931) is an English painter known for her op art paintings. She lives and works in London, Cornwall and the Vaucluse in France.

Early life and education Riley was born on 24 April 1931 in Norwood, London.

At the beginning of World War II, her father, a member of the Territorial Army, was mobilised, and Riley, together with her mother and sister Sally, moved to a cottage in Cornwall. They shared the cottage with an aunt who had studied at Goldsmiths' College, London and Riley attended talks given by a range of retired teachers and non-professionals. She attended Cheltenham Ladies' College (1946–1948) and then studied art at Goldsmiths' College (1949–52), and later at the Royal College of Art (1952–55).

Between 1956 and 1959, she nursed her father, who had been involved in a serious car crash. She suffered a breakdown due to the deterioration of her father's health. After this she worked in a glassware shop. She eventually joined the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, as an illustrator, where she worked part-time until 1962. The Whitechapel Gallery exhibition of Jackson Pollock in the winter of 1958 had an impact on her.

In 1959, Riley met the painter and art educator Maurice de Sausmarez at a residential summer school that he ran with Harry Thubron and Diane Thubron. He became her friend and mentor, inspiring her to look closer at Futurism and Divisionism and artists such as Klee and Seurat. Riley and de Sausmarez began an intense romantic relationship later that year and spent the summer of 1960 together painting in Italy where they visited the Venice Biennale which was hosting a large exhibition of Futurist art. When the relationship ended in autumn of the same year, Riley suffered a personal and artistic crisis, creating paintings that would lead to black and white Op Art works, such as Kiss (1961). and de Sausmarez's monograph on Riley and her work was published after his death in 1970.

In 1961, she and her partner Peter Sedgley visited the Vaucluse plateau in the South of France, and acquired a derelict farm which they eventually transformed into a studio. Back in London, in the spring of 1962, Victor Musgrave of Gallery One held her first solo exhibition.

Seurat's way of seeing

Riley began investigating colour in 1967, the year in which she produced her first stripe painting. Following a major retrospective in the early 1970s, Riley began travelling extensively. After a trip to Egypt in the early 1980s, where she was inspired by colourful hieroglyphic decoration, Riley began to explore colour and contrast. In some works, lines of colour are used to create a shimmering effect, while in others the canvas is filled with tessellating patterns. Typical of these later colourful works is Shadow Play.

Some works are titled after particular dates, others after specific locations (for instance, Les Bassacs, the village near Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt in the south of France where Riley has a studio).

Following a visit to Egypt in 1980–81, Riley created colours in what she called her 'Egyptian palette' and produced works such as the Ka and Ra series, which capture the spirit of the country, ancient and modern, and reflect the colours of the Egyptian landscape. In Delos (1983), for example, blue, turquoise, and emerald hues alternate with rich yellows, reds and white.

Murals Bolt of Colour, 2017–2019. Installation view, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas Riley has painted temporary murals for the Tate, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the National Gallery. In 2014, the Imperial College Healthcare Charity Art Collection commissioned her to make a permanent 56-metre mural for St Mary's Hospital, London; the work was installed on the 10th floor of the hospital's Queen Elizabeth Queen Mother Wing, joining two others she had painted more than 20 years earlier. Between 2017 and 2019 Riley completed a large wall painting for the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. This was the largest work she had yet undertaken, covering six of the building's eight walls. The mural referenced her Bolt of Colour of 1983, for the Royal Liverpool University Hospital and made use of a similar palette of Egyptian colours.

On the nature and role of the artist Riley made the following comments regarding artistic work in her lecture Painting Now, 23rd William Townsend Memorial Lecture, Slade School of Fine Art, London, 26 November 1996:

Writer and curator Riley has written on artists from Nicolas Poussin to Bruce Nauman. She co-curated Piet Mondrian: From Nature to Abstraction (with Sean Rainbird) at the Tate Gallery in 1996. Alongside art historian Robert Kudielka, Riley also served as curator of the 2002 exhibition "Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation", an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2002. In 2010, she curated an artists choice show at the National Gallery in London, choosing large figure paintings by Titian, Veronese, El Greco, Rubens, Poussin, and Paul Cézanne.

Exhibitions

In 1965, Riley exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City show, The Responsive Eye (created by curator William C. Seitz); the exhibition which first drew worldwide attention to her work and the Op Art movement. Her painting Current, 1964, was reproduced on the cover of the show's catalogue. The absence of copyright protection for artists in the United States at the time, saw her work exploited by commercial concerns which caused her to become disillusioned with such exhibitions. Legislation was eventually passed, following an initiative by New York-based artists, in 1967. and in 2003 the Tate Britain organised a major Riley retrospective. In 2005, her work was featured at Gallery Oldham. Between November 2010 and May 2011, her exhibition "Paintings and Related Work" was presented at the National Gallery, London.

In June and July 2014, the retrospective show "Bridget Riley: The Stripe Paintings 1961–2014" was presented at the David Zwirner Gallery in London. In July and August 2015, the retrospective show "Bridget Riley: The Curve Paintings 1961–2014" was presented at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea.

In November 2015, the exhibition Bridget Riley opened at David Zwirner in New York. The show features paintings and works on paper by the artist from 1981 to present; the fully illustrated catalogue features an essay by the art historian Richard Shiff and biographical notes compiled by Robert Kudielka.

A retrospective exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery, in partnership with the Hayward Gallery, ran from June to September 2019. It showed early paintings and drawings, black-and-white works of the 1960s, and studies that reveal her working methods. This major exhibition of her work, spanning her 70-year career, was also shown at Hayward Gallery from October 2019 to January 2020.

Riley's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.

In May 2023 Riley's first ceiling painting, Verve, was unveiled at The British School at Rome.

In 2023 Riley was the subject of an exhibition, Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio, at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Riley was a featured artist in the 2024 exhibition 'Friend, A Survey of Op-Art and Minimalism' at the Ki Smith Gallery. The exhibition benefitted Sentebale, a Lesotho based charity co-founded by Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso. Riley exhibited alongside Agnes Martin and Frank Stella, among others.

From October 21, 2025 – January 25, 2026, the Musée d'Orsay exhibited Bridget Riley: Starting Point, "explores how Bridget Riley’s study of Georges Seurat’s work served as a defining moment in the development of her artistic process."

From November 22, 2025 – May 4, 2026, the Turner Contemporary exhibited Bridget Riley: Learning to See.

Public collections

Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal Art Institute of Chicago Arts Council Collection, London Ferens Art Gallery, Hull Leeds Art Gallery Morley College, London Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Museum of Modern Art, New York National Museum Cardiff, Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales Ruth Borchard Collection, London Southampton City Art Gallery In 2013, Riley claimed that a wall-sized, black-and-white checkerboard work by Tobias Rehberger plagiarised her painting Movement in Squares and asked for it to be removed from display at the Berlin State Library's reading room.

Recognition In 1963, Riley was awarded the AICA Critics Prize as well as the John Moores, Liverpool Open Section Prize. A year later, she received a Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Travel bursary. In 1968, she received an International Painting Prize at the Venice Biennale. In 1974, she was named a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Riley has been given honorary doctorates by Oxford (1993) and Cambridge (1995). In 2003, she was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, and, in 1998, she became one of only 65 Members of the Order of the Companions of Honour in the Commonwealth. Also in 2012, she became the first woman to receive the , the Dutch art prize recognising the use of colour.

Philanthropy Riley is a Patron of Paintings in Hospitals, a charity established in 1959 to provide art for health and social care in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Between 1987 and 2014, she created three murals across the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the Queen Elizabeth Queen Mother Wing, St Mary's Hospital, London.

Since 2016 the Bridget Riley Art Foundation has funded the Bridget Riley Fellowship at the British School at Rome.

In 2017, alongside Yoko Ono and Tracey Emin, Riley donated artworks to an auction to raise money for Modern Art Oxford.

Art market 2006, Untitled (Diagonal Curve) (1966), a black-and-white canvas of dizzying curves, was bought by Jeffrey Deitch at Sotheby's for $2.1 million, nearly three times its $730,000 high estimate and also a record for the artist. February 2008, the artist's dotted canvas Static 2 (1966) brought £1,476,500 ($2.9 million), far exceeding its £900,000 ($1.8 million) high estimate, at Christie's in London. July 2008, Chant 2 (1967), part of the trio shown in the Venice Biennale, went to a private American collector for £2,561,250 ($5.1 million), at Sotheby's. March 2022, Gala (1974) sold for £4,362,000 ($5.8 million) at the 2022 Modern British Art Evening Sale in Christie's, London.