LONDON.- Bridget Riley has made prints throughout her career, extending the principles of her paintings into the editioned silk-screen medium.
This volume brings together more than 100 prints made since 1962 and explores Riley’s development as a printmaker as well as her relationship with leading printers in the UK.
Riley says in the book’s foreword: ‘printmaking has been a very valuable addition to my working life as a painter, allowing me to extend particular trains of thought.’
Riley’s prints reflect her development as painter by providing insights into the explorations and compositional devices on her way to making a painting. Printmaking has been an intermittent activity, rather than a main, continuous engagement. Riley’s work as a whole is characterized by consistency in partner with innovation. ‘All my work is one thing, as it were,’ she wrote in 1978, ‘it may appear different, but it is essentially the same.’
This new catalogue raisonné designed by Tim Harvey illustrates Bridget Riley’s graphic work in a larger, revised format. Alongside a full-colour inventory of the prints are updated essays by Lynn MacRitchie and Craig Hartley and an additional essay by Robert Kudielka, which all provide a greater context for Riley’s work. This definitive volume, a co-publication with The Bridget Riley Art Foundation and Thames & Hudson, also benefits from supplemental material including an illustrated artist biography and selected solo and group exhibition history.
The contributors
• Lynn MacRitchie has been active as an artist and writer since the 1970s.
• Craig Hartley was formerly the curator in charge of prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
• Robert Kudielka is the Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at
the University of the Arts, Berlin.
Alexandra Tommasini and Rosa Gubay are Bridget Riley’s archivists. exhibition
Bridget Riley: The Complete Prints is published to coincide with a survey of Riley’s prints at the Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, from 11 September to 17 October 2020.
