BRIDGET RILEY CH CBE
Born London 1931
Ref: CD 122
Study for Recollection
Signed, dated and inscribed lower left and right: Study for Recollection / Bridget Riley '86
Gouache: 26 x 25 3/8 in / 66 x 64.5 cm
Provenance:
Karsten Schubert, London [BR 12];
private collection, purchased at the 1992 exhibition
Exhibited:
London, Karsten Schubert, Bridget Riley: Works on Paper 1980-92, 15th October-14th November 1992, p.14, illus. in colour p.15
Executed in 1986 – a pivotal year in the artist’s development – Bridget Riley moved away from the verticality of her Egyptian series (1982-1985) with the introduction of the diagonal line. Study for ‘Recollection’ so elegantly underlies Riley’s thought-out approach: structure creates spontaneous effects. Here, yellow, mauve, pink, red, orange and teal planes interact, creating a symphony of both colour and movement. This new approach is categorised as the ‘Rhomboid’ or ‘Zig’ period, where the use of interlocking rhomboids appear to dance across the surface. Riley describes the structured compositions as ‘something like a coherent fabric of colour which advances and recedes in planes’, where the rhomboids ‘assume the potentiality of planes, being separated components which can hold different colours, which in turn can take up different positions in pictorial depth’.[1] Here, the eye is continually fooled, the rhomboid introducing an element of depth to the canvas. The juxtaposition of colours continually challenge our perception as the planes interact, moving back and forth; another step in her investigation into the opticality of two-dimensional art. Riley titles her paintings retrospectively, naming them ‘according to their spirit’, and drawing on ‘memories of sensations in the past which have some sort of correspondence with those in the painting.’[2] Within the present work however, Riley does not detail a memory but rather names the process of recollection itself.
[1] ‘Bridget Riley in Conversation with Michael Harrison’, in Bridget Riley: Colour, Stripes, Planes and Curves, exh. cat., Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge 2011, pp.12, 16.
[2] Bridget Riley in conversation with A. Farquharson, Bridget Riley: Recent Paintings and Gouaches, exh. cat., London, Waddington Galleries, 1996, p.11.
