Natalia Naish

Bridget Riley is one of the most important British painters of our time. Since the early 1960s, when she first gained recognition with her powerful black and white paintings, the artist has continued to explore the principles of abstraction in startling and original ways. Through her systematic engagement with colour, tone, form and structure, Riley pushes the boundaries of perception, challenging us to look at the world anew. This landmark publication brings together for the first time all of Bridget Riley’s known paintings, including well over 650 works ranging from the late 1940s to 2017. Each painting is illustrated with a full-page colour image, many of which have been sourced from the artist’s extensive archive and rarely published. Drawing on archival research and expert knowledge, the publication includes an introductory essay, explanation of materials and methods, extended exhibition history, biographical information and explanatory notes. The publication benefits from the remarkable input of Bridget Riley herself, who has been present at every stage of the project and has provided first-hand information about her work and exhibition and sales history. Bridget Riley: The Complete Paintings is a seminal visual resource and provides the most comprehensive overview of the artist’s paintings to date.

During the mid-1980s, Riley introduced a new pictorial device, the rhomboid, to her then predominantly vertical stripes, developing her exploration of interplaying tones of green, yellow and orange. This allowed the artist to construct new visual relationships between divergent colours and forms, creating what she terms a ‘harmony of contrasts’ that animates the entire visual field. Tracking a transitional period in Riley’s career, the works on paper in this volume – studies produced between 1984 and 1995 – shift from a focus on the vertical stripe to increasingly complex diagonal compositions. Illustrated in full colour, the works are accompanied by a historic interview with the artist by Robert Kudielka and a text by Riley’s archivists Natalia Naish and Alexandra Tommasini, situating these studies in relation to major paintings produced during this period.