Bridget Riley: Learning from Seurat, Courtauld Gallery

Bridget Rile art & Post Impressionism

Riley’s love of Seurat's spotty paintings forms the basis of this special display at the Courtauld Gallery where Seurat’s minute dashes are transformed into large, abstract lines or blocks of colour to make her trademark geometric style of flat canvasses marked by squares, stripes and rhombuses of black, white or pastel colours. These are often arranged into dizzying optical illusions, like in her famous Movement in Squares (1961). A chequerboard of black and white squares slide across the canvas into an infinitely vanishing line.

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Riley was born in 1931 in London and is considered a venerable and much-loved doyenne of the British art world. She is often cited as the most prominent artist to have worked with Op art – a movement that used optical illusions of shifting, shimmering abstractions which had its heyday in the mid-twentieth century.

Courtauld Gallery exhibition

Going back to Riley’s beginnings, the Courtauld have assembled Seurat’s masterpiece and six early works by Riley. It reveals the origins of Riley’s distinctive style, developed through Seurat, that examines the human way of seeing.

Small, serious, scholarly shows like these are why we love the Courtauld Gallery, and what it is unrivalled for. Expect some serious art history, but also to have your eyes widened.