Bridget Riley’s explorations of perception through form and color have made her into one of the most significant painters working today. Since the early 1960s, she has used elementary shapes—lines, circles, curves, and squares—to create visual experiences that immediately draw the viewer in, often triggering optical vibrations and illusions. More recently, Riley has shifted back to black and white in her large-scale paintings, marking a departure from her recent colored stripe paintings and a return to the palette of some of her earliest works. Published on the occasion of her 2015 solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Bridget Riley: Works 1981–2015 presents paintings from the last thirty-four years of her career, including images of Rajasthan, a wall painting previously shown in Germany and England, and exhibited for the first time in New York. These dynamic reproductions begin with stripe paintings from the 1980s and end with a coda of sorts —a return to black and white that ties back to her work from the 1960s, but bear traces of Riley’s deep engagement with color in the interim. As critic Éric de Chassey puts it in his essay for Riley’s 2015 catalogue with Galerie Max Hetzler: “The black-and-white paintings not only enter into a dialogue with the 1960s works, but take stock of every painting experience Riley has created during a long career.” Also included is a selection of the artist’s works on paper; taken together, these complementary aspects of her practice over the past four decades reveal the astonishing variety she has achieved by developing and rediscovering different forms. An essay by art historian Richard Shiff helps contextualize the developments in Riley’s practice since the early 1980s, and further emphasizes her influence and lineage as a painter. Rounding out the publication are biographical notes by Robert Kudielka, one of the artist’s foremost critics. With a career spanning six decades, Bridget Riley remains one of the most exciting painters today, and Bridget Riley: Works 1981–2015 presents a selection of works from what may be her richest period to date.

Bridget Riley is one of the outstanding figures of modern painting. For thirty-five years she has pursued a course of rigorous abstraction, from her celebrated Op Art works in black and white of the 1960s to the complex colour paintings of the 1990s. On the occasion of a major exhibition of her recent work at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1992, BBC Radio broadcast an illuminating series of five dialogues, each one between Riley and a well-known personality from the art world. These talks have been brought together in this volume, expertly edited by the art historian Robert Kudielka. With Neil MacGregor, Director of the National Gallery, London, she discusses the art of the past in relation to the present; with Sir Ernst Gombrich the perception of colour in painting; with the artist Michael Craig-Martin, the theory and practice of abstraction; and with the critics Bryan Robertson and Andrew Graham-Dixon she talks about the events and travels that have shaped her life as an artist.

Bridget Riley is one of Britain's most respected artists, with an international reputation. Her distinguished career encompasses forty years of uncompromising and remarkable innovation. paintings she began to make in 1961 under the 'Op Art' banner. Disseminated through the mass-media and widely plagiarized by the fashion industry, these came to epitomise an era. Since then she has remained at the forefront of developments in comtemporary painting, making highly distinctive works which seek to articulate an abstract language in which relations of colour and form generate visual sensations. includes key examples of all phases of her work. It accompanies the exhibition held at Tate Britain, Summer 2003.

Bridget Riley: Flashback is the first in a new series of monographic Hayward Touring exhibitions from the Arts Council Collection. Each exhibition will bring together outstanding early works by high profile British artists, and set them against major recent works borrowed from the artists themselves. This book tracks Bridget Riley's career from its sensational beginnings in the early 1960s to the ambitious and powerful paintings and works on paper of recent years. It includes an essay by Michael Bracewell and a new piece of writing by the artist discussing the genesis of a key early painting, Movement in Squares (1961). A chronology illustrated with archive photographs and an illustrated inventory of works by the artist in UK public collections complete this rich survey. Published to accompany the exhibition Bridget Riley: Flashback touring in 2009/10 to Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery; and Southampton City Art Gallery.

A selection of recent paintings and gouaches by Bridget Riley.

Contributions by Robert Kudielka, Raimund Stecker.