Bridget Riley

Dia center for the arts, New York
Through June 17

Bridget Riley’s vibrant optical paintings became famous in New York in1965. Stung by fashion designers stealing her images, she then chose to exhibit mostly in Europe and Japan. In 1965, abstract painting had not yet lost its dominant position in America. Riley had little in common with the color field painters of the 1960s, the minimalist tradition of Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman, or the visionary abstractions of Agnes Martin.

American artists of the 1960s were obsessed with literality. Riley, on the contrary, creates optical illusions. Dematerializing the picture surface, her images move before your eyes. The black and white curves ripple; the narrow vertical colored stripes vibrate; the black dots create white after-images; the parallelograms in color move diagonally.

Two exhibitions of her work are currently on show. There are paintings (1982-2000) and early works on paper at PaceWildenstein. At Dia Center, a site specific wall drawing accompanies her seminal 1960s paintings and some others from the 1970s. And her marvelous wall drawing Composition with Circles 2 at Dia shows how successfully she works on a large scale. The bare Dia space, with its large isolated rooms and ample distance between works, was an ideal setting for her vibrant paintings. PaceWildenstein, by putting the drawings near the back and two enormous recent decorative paintings in the front gallery, illuminated by natural light, also used the space to its best advantage.

Now, when abstraction has long been marginalized in New York, these exhibitions demonstrate how difficult it is, still, to understand the 1960s. Riley never responded to the appropriations of mass art by pop artists, or Johns and Rauschenberg. No wonder she disdained fashion design – her inspiration comes from art and nature. Her starting point may appear narrow, but she has proved to be wondrously inventive.

“In the end,” Riley has said of Monet, “there seems to be hardly any subject-matter left – only content.” I would associate her more closely with Seurat, but the same can be said about her painting. Her career tells the story of the triumph of absolute integrity over the fickle marketplace. If, when she was young, the commercial artworld treated her badly, now she achieves well-deserved recognition. These wonderful shows demonstrate how essential it is for an artist, who wants to survive early fame, to be doggedly persistent.




David Carrier