NEW HAVEN, CONN.- The Yale Center for British Art is presenting Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction from March 3 through July 24, 2022. Born in London in 1931, Riley is among the most important and influential painters in Britain and the world. Over the course of her seven-decades-long career she has enjoyed a continuing dialogue with museums, galleries, critics, and collectors in the United States. This major survey traces Riley’s oeuvre from the 1960s through the present by featuring over fifty works that were selected by the artist in collaboration with the YCBA.
“It has been a privilege to develop this survey with Bridget Riley and to see her paintings and drawings through her eyes. She points out things that we may overlook and invites us to experience her art in new ways. All the works in this exhibition were selected by Riley. It is truly her show,” said Courtney J. Martin, Paul Mellon Director of the Yale Center for British Art. “Riley might be best known for her early 1960s paintings, but the works, selected with her for the YCBA, reveal her as an artist and thinker of exceptional consequence who continued to innovate and push her practice over decades.”
The exhibition unfolds over two floors of the museum. It opens with Riley’s iconic painting Current (1964) which propelled her into the international spotlight when it was exhibited in The Responsive Eye at The Museum of Modern Art in 1965. It was this eager reception in the US that would set the tone for Riley’s international reputation. A full floor of the exhibition is dedicated to the black and white work of the 1960s, offering an in-depth exploration of Riley’s early perceptual abstraction.
The second part of the exhibition is flooded with color and light. Displayed on an entire floor, it presents Riley’s exploration of color and the shift from tonal modulations into saturated color. Starting with Late Morning, which was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1968, the exhibition traces Riley’s first paintings with a limited palette and a dramatically wider landscape format. This presentation of major large-scale works shows how the cycle of repose-disturbance-repose has been overtaken by a logic of sensation, to remain an anchor point throughout her practice.
The exhibition also explores Riley’s prints and studies. The seven Fragments (1965) prints on plexiglass show her working with new materials and new imagery. The four prints from the Nineteen Greys (1968) series play color and tone with and against each other through the agency of turning ovals. The gouache studies on paper provide an insight into how Riley works from inception to completion in the studio.
The exhibition was conceived by the artist in collaboration with Courtney J. Martin, Paul Mellon Director, Yale Center for British Art, working with Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani, former Postdoctoral Research Associate, with the assistance of Martina Droth, Deputy Director and Chief Curator; Charlotte Lefland, Senior Curatorial Assistant, Prints and Drawings; and Rachel Stratton, Postdoctoral Research Associate.
