In Bridget Riley’s first solo exhibition in New York in eight years, she presents a compelling survey of paintings and works on paper spanning over thirty years that display her ongoing engagement with the entirety of her oeuvre. Riley’s enduring interest in line and spatial relationships is evident throughout these works, starting with her Egyptian-inspired rectilinear paintings from the 1980s. Riley’s vibrant works in color from the 1990s project an optimistic perspective through their playfulness and evocative titles that ground these abstract paintings in the physical world. In Lagoon 2 (1997), rectangular purples and pinks intersect with curvilinear green, blue, and orange to form a geometric puzzle. In her most recent works, Riley returns to painting exclusively in black and white, a gesture that is both a direct reference to her instantly recognizable works from the 1960s and a method to reexamine the legacy of those works more than fifty years later.
-caa