Truth is often stranger than fiction, isn't it? Head to the newly opened venue of Charleston in Lewes for Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece: An Untold Story , an exhibition that relates a piece of art history that, you have to say, would make a good film. And here are the two principal characters: Dorothy, on the left, a talented graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art , and her fellow student, friend, lover, partner and collaborator Patricia, perhaps not quite so talented, but both passionate about art. The photograph seems to tell you a lot. Dorothy looks a little bit awkward and ill at ease, slightly frumpy, androgynous even. Patricia appears confident, glamorous, exuberant, perhaps a little.... possessive? But maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. We need to establish the plot.... The rather retiring Hepworth and the outgoing, gregarious Preece became inseparable as students, and they planned to set up a studio together after graduation. In 1922, Preece took exam
Prepare yourself for some sensory overload. Curves, stripes, zig-zags, wavy lines, dots, in black and white or colour. Look at many of the paintings of Bridget Riley and you're unable to escape the eerie sensation that the picture in front of you is in motion, has its own inner three-dimensional life, is not just inert paint on flat canvas, panel or plaster.
It's by no means unusual to see selections of Riley's paintings on display, but a blockbuster exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh brings together 70 years of her pictures in a dazzling extravaganza of abstraction, including a recreation of her only actual 3D work, which you walk into for a perspectival sensurround experience. It's "that thrill of pleasure which sight itself reveals," as Riley once said.
It's a really terrific show, and the thrill of pleasure in the Scottish capital was enhanced by the unexpected lack of visitors on the day we went to see it, with huge empty spaces in the gallery giving us plenty of time to fully appreciate the pictures from all sorts of distances and angles. We suspect things will be a bit more crowded when the exhibition moves to the Hayward Gallery on London's South Bank in October.
This show takes you on a complete retrospective of Riley's career (though you don't get to see her early years until the very final room), but the highlights are possibly from the breakthrough op-art years in the 1960s. Blaze 1 is one of the most intriguing images, from Riley's attempt to capture the sensations experienced in nature through abstract forms. The concentric zig-zag circles, not a spiral as may appear at first sight, seem to rotate in front of your eyes. It's as if you were looking at a black-and-white sun.
Room 1 of the exhibition takes us back to Riley's early fascination with Georges Seurat's pointillism and his use of colour to generate light, energy and action in a painting. She copied Seurat's Bridge at Courbevoie in 1959, and the same year painted this Lincolnshire Landscape, inspired by another Seurat work, La Luzerne, Saint Denis, which you can see in the main part of the Edinburgh gallery's permanent collection.
And this first room, introducing you to Riley, already contains pictures that have you questioning what your eyes are seeing. Burn from 1964 is based on a sort of dogtooth pattern, but the individual triangles of black and white that make up the image are subtly graduated, and the blacks fade into grey producing a type of diamond image, and indeed a veil-like effect, towards the bottom of the panel. The picture appears three-dimensional, even though it's not, and the sides of the picture seem curved, even though they're straight.
Cataract 3, an early excursion into colour, is just as unsettling. Any slight movement of your head and the wave forms give the impression that the image is somehow flowing in front of you.
Riley's paintings are full of subtle geometric adjustments and repetition to create dynamism, what she has described as a recurring process of "repose, disturbance and repose." One room in this show is full of preparatory studies for paintings, demonstrating her meticulous working method. It's astonishing to consider how time-consuming and painstaking working out the details of all this manually, on graph paper, would have been in a pre-computer age.
Current was one of a group of paintings featuring long curved lines that helped Riley gain international recognition in the mid-1960s. It was acquired early on by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As with Cataract, do take a close-up look to grasp how the effect is created.
Riley moved away from black-and-white in the 1970s, a period when she painted repetitions of twisted curves in a changing order of colours. In works like Clepsydra there's a tangible three-dimensional feeling to the image. It's almost as if the pictures are painted on fine fabrics that seem to be billowing gently in the lightest of breezes.
Further development in Riley's work came in the late 1980s, with rhomboid paintings such as High Sky that show a dynamic and increasingly complex use of colour in patterns of vertical and diagonal stripes.
Then, in the late 1990s, Riley reintroduced curves into her work. In paintings made directly on to the wall, the images seem to extend beyond what might be thought of as the frame, with the white background becoming another component in the composition. This vibrant mix of red, green and orange is Rajasthan, from 2012. The flame-like fiery colours seem to lick the green, evoking the heat of the Indian desert. Rajasthan appears so large you wonder how it was transported to Edinburgh from its home in Stuttgart.
Before you get to the final room, which takes a look at Riley's pre-abstract artistic beginnings in the 1940s and 1950s (it's interesting, but feels like a wee bit of an afterthought and an oddish way to end the show), the penultimate section brings us bang up to date. It's astonishing to consider that this grande dame of British art is now in her late 80s and still producing such work.
In 2017 she started making paintings with the disc as the main form (and you can see one of these on a huge scale, Messengers, at the National Gallery in London), but she's also been returning to the black-and-white designs of the 1960s, with Harlequin from 2016 repeating the triangles seen in Burn, but adding complexity by making one side either convex or concave, producing a rippling effect.
This really is a thrilling and pleasurable show, one of the top handful we've seen in 2019, and beautifully presented in the Scottish National Gallery's marvellously roomy exhibition space. And it was almost empty! Where was everybody? Well, apparently they get more people in when it's raining, and it'll be busier when the Festival is on in August. So see it now, or see it later in London. But do see it.
The Hayward Gallery show in London starts on October 23 and is on until January 26.
Bridget Riley, Lincolnshire Landscape, 1959, Private collection
Bridget Riley, Burn, 1964, Private collection
Bridget Riley, Cataract 3 (detail), 1967, British Council Collection
Bridget Riley, Current, 1964, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Bridget Riley, High Sky, 1991, Private collection. © Bridget Riley 2019. All rights reserved
Bridget Riley, Rajasthan, 2012, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
It's by no means unusual to see selections of Riley's paintings on display, but a blockbuster exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh brings together 70 years of her pictures in a dazzling extravaganza of abstraction, including a recreation of her only actual 3D work, which you walk into for a perspectival sensurround experience. It's "that thrill of pleasure which sight itself reveals," as Riley once said.
It's a really terrific show, and the thrill of pleasure in the Scottish capital was enhanced by the unexpected lack of visitors on the day we went to see it, with huge empty spaces in the gallery giving us plenty of time to fully appreciate the pictures from all sorts of distances and angles. We suspect things will be a bit more crowded when the exhibition moves to the Hayward Gallery on London's South Bank in October.
This show takes you on a complete retrospective of Riley's career (though you don't get to see her early years until the very final room), but the highlights are possibly from the breakthrough op-art years in the 1960s. Blaze 1 is one of the most intriguing images, from Riley's attempt to capture the sensations experienced in nature through abstract forms. The concentric zig-zag circles, not a spiral as may appear at first sight, seem to rotate in front of your eyes. It's as if you were looking at a black-and-white sun.
Current was one of a group of paintings featuring long curved lines that helped Riley gain international recognition in the mid-1960s. It was acquired early on by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As with Cataract, do take a close-up look to grasp how the effect is created.
Further development in Riley's work came in the late 1980s, with rhomboid paintings such as High Sky that show a dynamic and increasingly complex use of colour in patterns of vertical and diagonal stripes.
In 2017 she started making paintings with the disc as the main form (and you can see one of these on a huge scale, Messengers, at the National Gallery in London), but she's also been returning to the black-and-white designs of the 1960s, with Harlequin from 2016 repeating the triangles seen in Burn, but adding complexity by making one side either convex or concave, producing a rippling effect.
Practicalities
Bridget Riley runs until September 22 at the Scottish National Gallery and is open daily from 1000 to 1700, and until 1900 on Thursdays. Tickets can be booked online here: They cost £13 full-price Mondays to Fridays and £14 at the weekends, going up to £15 every day in August. The gallery is on The Mound, just off Princes St and a few minutes' walk from Waverley station.The Hayward Gallery show in London starts on October 23 and is on until January 26.
Images
Bridget Riley, Blaze I, 1962, Private collection, on long loan to National Galleries of Scotland. © Bridget Riley 2019. All rights reservedBridget Riley, Lincolnshire Landscape, 1959, Private collection
Bridget Riley, Burn, 1964, Private collection
Bridget Riley, Cataract 3 (detail), 1967, British Council Collection
Bridget Riley, Current, 1964, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Bridget Riley, High Sky, 1991, Private collection. © Bridget Riley 2019. All rights reserved
Bridget Riley, Rajasthan, 2012, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
Bridget Riley, Harlequin, 2016, Private collection, Switzerland
Comments
Post a Comment