Bridget Riley

(British, born 1931)

Sequence Study, Pale Colours 30.5 x 145 cm. (12 x 57 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With Swan Gallery, London
With Rowan Gallery, London, 26 April 1977, where acquired by the family of the present owners
Private Collection, U.K.

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. With a long and illustrious career spanning over five decades, her work explores optical effect, spatial illusion, and the interaction between movement, colour and light.

The first works were executed in 1961, at the forefront of the Op Art revolution, and worked solely in black and white. However, the artist soon adopted the use of a tonal grey palette, viewing it as a midway point, and from 1967 she explored a much wider colour spectrum. Her work evolved through these different phases which explored complex colour and spatial relationships using a multitude of devices and motifs, but studies on paper have always remained an integral part of Bridget Riley's practice. These have functioned as sites of discovery for the artist, fuelling her career-long investigation into colour analyses, line and form. 'For me, drawing is an enquiry, a way of finding out—the first thing that I discover is that I do not know', Riley has said. 'It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness' (Bridget Riley, 'At the End of My Pencil', London Review of Books, Vol. 31, no.19, 8 October 2009).

Sequence Study, Pale Colours is a large-scale example of a work on paper by the artist and comes to sale fresh to the market, having been in the same family collection since 1977. Vertical bands of yellow, baby blue and dusky pink run horizontally across the sheet, intersected by bands of unpainted paper, and offer a striking example of Riley's experiments in graphite and gouache. These linear arrangements enabled her to organise hues in such a way 'that the eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature ... It encounters reflections, echoes and fugitive flickers which when traced evaporate' (Bridget Riley, 'The Pleasures of Sight', in Bridget Riley, exh.cat., Tate Gallery, London 2003, p.214).

Bridget Riley has been recognised with numerous awards throughout her career. In 1968, she represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, where she gained the distinction as the first living British artist and the first female artist to win the International Prize for Painting. Her work is collected by institutions around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Tate Gallery in London. In particular, many of Riley's works on paper have been exhibited widely in exhibitions across the world, including her seminal retrospective exhibitions in Edinburgh and London from 2019 and 2020 organised by the National Galleries of Scotland, and at the Hayward Gallery's show in 2020.