Artists
Bridget Riley
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b. 1931
Bridget Riley is a prominent British artist known for her Optical art. Like many of the top Contemporary artists, Riley studied at Goldsmiths College and then the Royal College of Art. Her work focused on geometric patterns and manipulating the eye and mind to believe that there was movement.
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Riley was part of the 1960s art and experiential movements that included involving the audience in the art. Moving in a natural progression from Impressionism to Neo-Impressionism to the Pointillism of Seurat, Riley eventually found her own style. Through the conflation of formal elements of painting, the highly constructed designs of the Futurists, and the unique social climate of the 1960s defined by hallucinogenics, Riley emerged as an artist of Optics.
The artist soon became disillusioned by the commercial exploitation of the Op Art she had helped develop in the late 1960s, a style that was defined by the duality between body and mind; her work engages the viewer not only with the object of their gaze but also with the actual process of observation. She began to turn her focus towards the tessillating patterns of textiling and the intensive decoration of hieroglyphics. Riley explored optical phenomena, but now juxtaposes color by using chromatic techniques of identifiable hues or by applying achromatic colors.