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Lot Essay
‘Eventually I found what I was looking for in the conjunction of the vertical and diagonal ... this conjunction was the new form. It could be seen as a patch of colour - acting almost like a brush mark. When enlarged, these formal patches became coloured planes that could take up different positions in space’
BRIDGET RILEY
‘One never sees a colour isolated, and so you never know exactly what a particular colour is in itself’
BRIDGET RILEY
With its kaleidoscopic field of tessellating parallelograms, rendered in a dizzying spectrum of variegated hues, Into Place (1987) is indicative of the new directions pursued by Bridget Riley during the late 1980s. Moving away from the thin vertical stripes that had defined her practice since the 1960s, the artist hit upon a new structure through which to channel her ground-breaking optical investigations. ‘Eventually I found what I was looking for in the conjunction of the vertical and diagonal ... this conjunction was the new form’, she explains. ‘It could be seen as a patch of colour – acting almost like a brush mark. When enlarged, these formal patches became coloured planes that could take up different positions in space’ (B. Riley, quoted in Bridget Riley Flashback, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2009, p. 18). Known colloquially in the studio as ‘zigs’, these diagonal squares allowed Riley to engage in new ways with the distinctive, vivid palette she had adopted following her trip to Egypt in the winter of 1979-80. The edge-to-edge contact between vertical stripes in her earlier oeuvre had allowed her to observe the shifting identity of her chosen chromatic values through a simple economy of means. However, as her tonal spectrum broadened throughout the 1980s, Riley sought more rigorous formal units through which to examine the spatial and dynamic properties of her palette. Connected to one another via four edges – rather than two, as in the stripes – Riley’s zigs allow her colours to interact in multiple shifting configurations, existing as individual units or merging into larger blocks. The cascading parallelograms shatter the picture plane into myriad fragments, dramatically compounding the sense of push and pull between competing tonalities. The present work’s title – Into Place – eloquently captures the way in which the zigs coalesce, unite and align within our vision.
Inspired by a number of art-historical precedents – from Georges Seurat’s pointillist visions to the dynamism of the Italian Futurists – Riley devoted her career to sequencing colour, drawing out the natural energy of different tonalities through close juxtaposition. In the present work, the result is a closely woven pictorial space in which colour becomes rhythm, pulsing in syncopated counterpoint with its neighbouring forces. This sense of disturbed equilibrium produces an almost electrical charge that causes the canvas to thrum from endto- end. ‘The colours are organised on the canvas so that the eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature’, explains Riley. ‘It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift … One moment there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas suddenly seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events’ (B. Riley, ‘The Pleasures of Sight’, 1984, in R. Kudielka (ed.), The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley Collected Writings 1965-1999, London 1973, p. 33). These shifting perceptual states act upon both the retina and the psyche, inducing agitation and meditation in equal measure. Through these mechanisms, works such as Into Place play with both sight and feeling, simulating and amplifying the way in which we engage with the world around us. They are multi-sensory laboratories in which the inner properties of colour – its energy, its depth, its resonance – are laid bare.
BRIDGET RILEY
‘One never sees a colour isolated, and so you never know exactly what a particular colour is in itself’
BRIDGET RILEY
With its kaleidoscopic field of tessellating parallelograms, rendered in a dizzying spectrum of variegated hues, Into Place (1987) is indicative of the new directions pursued by Bridget Riley during the late 1980s. Moving away from the thin vertical stripes that had defined her practice since the 1960s, the artist hit upon a new structure through which to channel her ground-breaking optical investigations. ‘Eventually I found what I was looking for in the conjunction of the vertical and diagonal ... this conjunction was the new form’, she explains. ‘It could be seen as a patch of colour – acting almost like a brush mark. When enlarged, these formal patches became coloured planes that could take up different positions in space’ (B. Riley, quoted in Bridget Riley Flashback, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2009, p. 18). Known colloquially in the studio as ‘zigs’, these diagonal squares allowed Riley to engage in new ways with the distinctive, vivid palette she had adopted following her trip to Egypt in the winter of 1979-80. The edge-to-edge contact between vertical stripes in her earlier oeuvre had allowed her to observe the shifting identity of her chosen chromatic values through a simple economy of means. However, as her tonal spectrum broadened throughout the 1980s, Riley sought more rigorous formal units through which to examine the spatial and dynamic properties of her palette. Connected to one another via four edges – rather than two, as in the stripes – Riley’s zigs allow her colours to interact in multiple shifting configurations, existing as individual units or merging into larger blocks. The cascading parallelograms shatter the picture plane into myriad fragments, dramatically compounding the sense of push and pull between competing tonalities. The present work’s title – Into Place – eloquently captures the way in which the zigs coalesce, unite and align within our vision.
Inspired by a number of art-historical precedents – from Georges Seurat’s pointillist visions to the dynamism of the Italian Futurists – Riley devoted her career to sequencing colour, drawing out the natural energy of different tonalities through close juxtaposition. In the present work, the result is a closely woven pictorial space in which colour becomes rhythm, pulsing in syncopated counterpoint with its neighbouring forces. This sense of disturbed equilibrium produces an almost electrical charge that causes the canvas to thrum from endto- end. ‘The colours are organised on the canvas so that the eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature’, explains Riley. ‘It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift … One moment there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas suddenly seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events’ (B. Riley, ‘The Pleasures of Sight’, 1984, in R. Kudielka (ed.), The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley Collected Writings 1965-1999, London 1973, p. 33). These shifting perceptual states act upon both the retina and the psyche, inducing agitation and meditation in equal measure. Through these mechanisms, works such as Into Place play with both sight and feeling, simulating and amplifying the way in which we engage with the world around us. They are multi-sensory laboratories in which the inner properties of colour – its energy, its depth, its resonance – are laid bare.