Bridget Riley

(British, born 1931)

Revision of January 10 44.5 x 87 cm. (17 1/2 x 34 1/4 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With Pace Wildenstein, New York, where acquired by
Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, Ireland

Bridget Riley is one of the major forces in the development of female post-war British artists, whose earliest solo shows at Gallery One in London in 1962, Richard Feigen Gallery, New York, 1965 and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1966 propelled her onto the international stage. Her dazzling black and white canvases from this period are now some of the most instantly recognisable images by any living artist.

From this time her work evolved through different phases which explored complex colour and spatial relationships using a multitude of devices and motifs. By the late 1990s the quadrilateral dominated Riley's output, which incorporated a spread of technicolour along both vertical and diagonal axes. Then, in 1997, a seminal canvas was made titled Lagoon 1, which introduced curved elements and spawned the way for what have become known as the artist's 'curvilinear paintings', as Robert Kudielka explains:

'However much her themes may vary, the top to bottom relationship underpins the general layout and formal extension. But the new curvilinear movements also incorporate the biggest destabilisation of this vertical basis. In 1986 Riley crossed the vertical register with a field of parallel diagonals rising from bottom left to top right. For the next ten years she worked with this dynamic opposition until she began to connect the regular vertical pulse with the diagonal subdivisions through circular segments. The reintroduction of a curved element in 1997 eventually resulted in the recent group of paintings [such as Revision of January 10]' (Robert Kudielka, Robert Kudielka on Bridget Riley: Essays and interviews 1972-2003, Ridinghouse, London, 2005, p. 213)

Seeking to successfully incorporate the curve on a permanent basis, Riley scaled back the plethora of colours used in her hard-edged paintings of the 1990s and scaled up the size of the formal motifs, so that by the early 2000s only a handful of pigments were deployed (five at most), with some of the oils being among her largest to date; Evoë 3 (2003) in collection of Tate, for example, measures almost six metres across.

Yet the smaller related works on paper from this period are no less satisfying, evidenced by Revision of January 10 with its rhythmic harmonies of carefully juxtaposed colour pairings, with the blue and green a particular favourite of the artist. These later works are quite different to those which preceded them, as Kudielka comments:

'Thanks to the complex compositional stratification of her recent [curvilinear] paintings there is no longer a stable ground plane carrying the painting, nor do isolated forms exist against some kind of background. Instead, the colour shapes shift, contrast and alternate in space according to a structural rhythm that is specific to each particular painting.' (Op.cit.221)

We are grateful to the Bridget Riley Archive for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.