Bridget Riley is an English painter known for her op art paintings - a 1960s art phenomenon where art created optical illusions of depth, warping, and energy. Instead of painting objects or landscapes, her true medium is human perception itself. Her specific use of geometric abstraction and vibrant interacting colours make the flat canvases actively move, shimmer, vibrate before your eyes, making the viewer feel physically immersed in the art.
Seurat's 'Pointilism' majorly influenced her to both explore the depth of colour theory, and to approach abstraction with extreme precision. This can be seen in the evolution of her career: while she masters the black and white in her earlier works, she later incorporated colour as another layer and nuance to her visual language. In her hands, the stripes or shapes trick the brain into creating new colours on the canvas, meaning each viewer will perceive the painting differently. Riley's art recast the viewer's role within the modernist tradition: rather than offering a static, passive image to be contemplated at a distance, her work demanded sustained physical engagement, unfolding as what she termed a 'durational event' where perception itself became the subject of the work. The insistence on optical instability positioned her at the firefront of Op Art, and as one of the few women to achieve prominence within a movement and an avant-garde more broadly, still dominated by men.
