Text by Michael Bracewell, Bridget Riley, Robert Kudielka.
Bridget Riley is that rare instance of an artist whose work breaks free of art history and merges with the broader cultural imagination, yet preserves for itself a rigorous, focused dialogue with painting's most basic properties: the interaction of form and color. Produced in close collaboration with the artist, Flashback tracks Bridget Riley's career from its sensational beginnings in the early 1960s, at the helm of Op art, to the ambitious and powerful paintings and works on paper of recent years. Alongside a wealth of reproductions of works from 1961 to 2007, it also features an illustrated chronology and list of works in U.K. public collections, an essay by Michael Bracewell and a wonderful meditation by Riley, titled “Work,” in which she looks back on the curve of her art across the decades. “You cannot deal with thought directly outside practice as a painter,” she writes: “‘doing' is essential in order to find out what form your thought takes.” Flashback reveals Riley's achievement in all its energetic glory, surveyable in one concise volume.
"For me, drawing is an enquiry, a way of finding out—the first thing that I discover is that I do not know. This is alarming even to the point of momentary panic. Only experience reassures me that this encounter with my own ignorance—with the unknown—is my chosen and particular task, and provided that I can make the required effort the rewards may teach the unimaginable. It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness. To break down this thickness, this deadening opacity, to elicit some particle of clarity or insight, is what I want to do." Bridget Riley, excerpted from Bridget Riley: Flashback.
FORMAT: Hbk, 8.75 x 10.5 in. / 96 pgs / 74 color / 10 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $35.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $40 ISBN: 9781853322808 PUBLISHER: Hayward Gallery Publishing AVAILABLE: 2/28/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA ME
Published by Hayward Gallery Publishing. Text by Michael Bracewell, Bridget Riley, Robert Kudielka.
Bridget Riley is that rare instance of an artist whose work breaks free of art history and merges with the broader cultural imagination, yet preserves for itself a rigorous, focused dialogue with painting's most basic properties: the interaction of form and color. Produced in close collaboration with the artist, Flashback tracks Bridget Riley's career from its sensational beginnings in the early 1960s, at the helm of Op art, to the ambitious and powerful paintings and works on paper of recent years. Alongside a wealth of reproductions of works from 1961 to 2007, it also features an illustrated chronology and list of works in U.K. public collections, an essay by Michael Bracewell and a wonderful meditation by Riley, titled “Work,” in which she looks back on the curve of her art across the decades. “You cannot deal with thought directly outside practice as a painter,” she writes: “‘doing' is essential in order to find out what form your thought takes.” Flashback reveals Riley's achievement in all its energetic glory, surveyable in one concise volume.
