Riley Stripey

RILEY STRIPEY

The Runway at Marc Jacob's recent Spring 2013 show in New York looked like a collection of moving artwork by Bridget Riley, all black and white op-art, long fluid fabrics in monotone stripes. Moschino in Milan took the sixties influence even further, their black and white stripes were a tribute to Jean Shrimpton, more mod-mini than flowing, ready to jump on the pillion of a scooter.

So what were Bridget Riley's influences? In 1960 she visited Italy, where she was impressed not only by the black and white Romanesque buildings of Pisa, but was also interested in the Italian Futurist painters such as Balla and Boccioni. In the same year she developed a style which explored perception and the dynamic potential of optical phenomena, concentrating on shape. Her work seemed to flicker and pulsate.

 

She continued to paint in black and white throughout the sixties, when there was a new perceived need for audience participation in art, with the so called 'Happenings', but at the same time concerns about a scientific future, and fears about a loss of genuine individual experience.

In 1965 her work was shown in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in an exhibition called 'The Responsive Eye'. Critics dismissed her work as 'trompe l'oeil', but op-art was entering public consciousness, seen as cool, and Riley became Britain's number one art celebrity. This is itself was a new modern phenomena, artist as celebrity, long before Damien Hirst and the Young British Artists.

She began introducing colour into these op-art works in 1966, oddly enough round about the time that people were starting to get colour tvs. The world was turning into colour!

So who has followed in Riley's shoes? Ross Bleckner and Philip Taaffe, to name a couple, admit her influence in their art.