Bridget Riley: Paintings and Related Work Colin Wiggins, Marla Prather, Michael Bracewell

Published to accompany the exhibition Bridget Riley: Paintings and Related Work at the National Gallery, London, 24 November – 22 May 2011.

For fifty years Bridget Riley has been regarded as Britain’s greatest abstract painter, renowned for her large paintings, with their complex, repeated geometric shapes and undulating linear patterns. Given the graphic nature of these works, it is fascinating to discover that Riley sees her decidedly modern paintings as following in an Old Master pictorial tradition. This affinity stems from her lifelong passion for paintings in the National Gallery, London, with which she has a long association: first as a young student and later as a Trustee. This book shows how the fluid lines of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, together with their palette of ochres, pinks, greens and light blues, translate into the abstracted shapes that appear in Riley’s paintings. The techniques and approaches of early modern masters such as Cézanne, Seurat and Matisse are also important influences in her work.

Michael Bracewell is an author and cultural commentator who has published widely on contemporary art.

Marla Prather is Curator of Twentieth-Century Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Colin Wiggins is Special Projects Curator at the National Gallery, London. Previous publications include The Hoerengracht: Kienholz at the National Gallery (2009) and Ron Mueck (2003).

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