© Bridget Riley 2014. All rights reserved, courtesy Karsten Schubert, London
On view
Haskell Education Center
Untitled,
1962
One of Riley’s earliest forays into printmaking, this work is based on a painting presented at her first solo exhibition, at Gallery One in London in 1962. Riley embraced screenprinting for its ability to render precise geometries and flat, even surfaces, although at the time the technique was widely considered a commercial rather than an art process. For this composition, she used a stencil to achieve the sharp edges and striking black-and-white contrast, which create an aggressive optical effect that makes the image appear as if it is spinning and vibrating. Riley’s black-and-white works epitomize Op art’s use of formal elements to affect the viewer’s perception of space. She has described such works as "events" that are designed to draw attention to "the explosive facts of actually looking."
More Context
The work of Bridget Riley exemplifies the ways in which the theories of pure abstraction that had been developed in Europe before the Second World War were adopted by younger post-war artists trained in universities and art schools in the 1950–60s. Following the artist’s first solo exhibition in London, in 1962, Riley’s optically aggressive paintings came to epitomize the international style critics labeled Op Art. With its sharpedged clarity and flat color areas, the silkscreen process had been used primarily for commercial advertising purposes, but in the 1960s the medium became a favorite printmaking technique for British and American artists.
More About This Object
Information
1962
Europe, England, London
- Karsten Schubert, essays by Lynn MacRitchie and Craig Hartley, Bridget Riley: Complete Prints, 1962-2010 (London: Ridinghouse, 2010). , no. 1a
- "Acquisitions of the Princeton University Art Museum 2012," Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 71/72 (2012-13): p. 105-132., p. 120
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 56
