32 Facts About Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley was a printer by trade and owned his own business.

Bridget Riley attended Cheltenham Ladies' College and then studied art at Goldsmiths' College, and later at the Royal College of Art.

Bridget Riley suffered a breakdown due to the deterioration of her father's health.

Bridget Riley eventually joined the J Walter Thompson advertising agency, as an illustrator, where she worked part-time until 1962.

In 1959 Bridget Riley met the painter and art educator Maurice de Sausmarez at a residential summer school that he ran with Harry Thubron and Diane Thubron.

Bridget Riley became her friend and mentor, inspiring her to look closer at Futurism and Divisionism and artists such as Klee and Seurat.

Bridget Riley painted Pink landscape, a pointillist study of the landscape near Radicofani during this holiday.

Bridget Riley began to develop her signature Op Art style consisting of black and white geometric patterns that explore the dynamism of sight and produce a disorienting effect on the eye and produces movement and colour.

Bridget Riley has often cited his role as an early mentor and de Sausmarez's monograph on Bridget Riley and her work was published after his death in 1970.

Early in her career, Bridget Riley worked as an art teacher for children from 1957 to 1958 at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Harrow.

Jones comments that Bridget Riley investigated Seurat's pointillism by painting from a book illustration of Seurat's Bridge at an expanded scale to work out how his technique made use of complementary colours, and went on to create pointillist landscapes of her own, such as Pink Landscape, painted soon after her Seurat study and portraying the "sun-filled hills of Tuscany" which Jones writes could readily be taken for a post-impressionist original.

Bridget Riley began investigating colour in 1967, the year in which she produced her first stripe painting.

In 1983, for the first time in fifteen years, Bridget Riley returned to Venice to study the paintings that form the basis of European colourism.

Towards the end of the 1980s, Bridget Riley's work underwent a dramatic change with the reintroduction of the diagonal in the form of a sequence of parallelograms used to disrupt and animate the vertical stripes that had characterized her previous paintings.

Bridget Riley has painted temporary murals for the Tate, the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the National Gallery.

Between 2017 and 2019 Bridget Riley completed a large wall painting for the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas.

Bridget Riley made the following comments regarding artistic work in her lecture Painting Now, 23rd William Townsend Memorial Lecture, Slade School of Fine Art, London, 26 November 1996:.

Bridget Riley has written on artists from Nicolas Poussin to Bruce Nauman.

Bridget Riley co-curated Piet Mondrian: From Nature to Abstraction at the Tate Gallery in 1996.

Alongside art historian Robert Kudielka, Bridget Riley served as curator of the 2002 exhibition "Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation", an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2002.

In 1965, Riley exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City show, The Responsive Eye ; the exhibition which first drew worldwide attention to her work and the Op Art movement.

Bridget Riley's painting Current, 1964, was reproduced on the cover of the show's catalogue.

Bridget Riley participated in documentas IV and VI.

In 1968, Bridget Riley represented Great Britain in the Venice Biennale, where she was the first British contemporary painter, and the first woman, to be awarded the International Prize for painting.

In November 2015, the exhibition Bridget Riley opened at David Zwirner in New York.

Bridget Riley's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.

In 2013, Bridget Riley claimed that a wall-sized, black-and-white checkerboard work by Tobias Rehberger plagiarised her painting Movement in Squares and asked for it to be removed from display at the Berlin State Library's reading room.

In 1963, Bridget Riley was awarded the AICA Critics Prize as well as the John Moores, Liverpool Open Section Prize.

Bridget Riley has been given honorary doctorates by Oxford and Cambridge.

Bridget Riley has received the Goslarer Kaiserring of the city of Goslar in 2009 and the 12th Rubens Prize of Siegen in 2012.

Bridget Riley is a Patron of Paintings in Hospitals, a charity established in 1959 to provide art for health and social care in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

In 2017, alongside Yoko Ono and Tracey Emin, Bridget Riley donated artworks to an auction to raise money for Modern Art Oxford.