A Bexhill-on-Sea retrospective of intellect-bending curve paintings shows why Riley is Britain’s most meaningful contemporary artistBridget Riley is the most primary British painter of the contemporary age. Bacon? Freud? Hockney? None of those celebrated men took hold of the language of painting and remade it as she has. Most of the artists we are nationally proud of are sideshow performers who dallied with figuration long after it was blown apart by Jackson Pollock. Abstraction is the true destiny of contemporary painting and Riley and Howard Hodgkin are Britains two powerful living exponents of it. If Hodgkin resembles a poet,Riley is more like a scientist. In the 1960s she revealed a revolution hidden in the human eye. To look at Riley’s 1964 painting Crest is to be sucked into a dazzling shimmering superstring universe. What has happened to reality? It has become a rushing cascade of black and white lines, warping in unison. The effect of this wave motion is to obtain the painting, or as you approach it,move and expand. The brain cannot decipher what the eye sees. Instead of lines on a flat surface you experience a vertiginous plummeting waterfall of three dimensional space. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com