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拍品專文
'The essential subject of a work by Bridget Riley is not only order but the thousand ways of subverting it … In front of a Riley, with its demanding surface of instability within order, there is no complacency; and this is as true of the weavings and swellings of colour in her wavelike paintings of the seventies as of the earlier black and white work. What seem, at first, variations of a “mere” pattern turn into metaphors of unease, uncertainties tuned with an exquisite poetic skill’ (R. Hughes, The Shock of the New, New York, 1980, p. 406).
Gifted by the artist to the celebrated critic Robert Hughes, and held in his collection ever since, Bridget Riley’s Orpheus Study 14 is exquisite example of the gouache works on paper that lie at the core of her visual enquiries. Executed in 1978, it relates to her pivotal Song of Orpheus series created that year. Following her embrace of colour in the late 1960s, the series marks the transition from three to five hues within each work, paving the way for the so-called ‘Egyptian palette’ she would begin to explore the next year. In the Orpheus works, the optical undulation of Riley’s twisting motif undermines the autonomy of each individual tone, giving rise to some of her most fluid explorations of colour and line. Comprising pencil drawing with hand-mixed ribbons of gouache, Riley’s studies played a key role in the calculation of these effects. ‘It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness’, she explains. ‘… I am watching and simultaneously recording myself looking, discovering things that on the one hand are staring me in the face and on the other I have not yet really seen … it is in this way that I assimilate experience and find new ground’ (B. Riley, ‘At the End of My Pencil’, in London Review of Books, Vol. 31, No. 19, 8 October 2009, p. 20). A further study is held in the Yale Center for British Art, with paintings from the series housed in the British Arts Council Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Described as ‘the world’s most famous art critic’ by The New Yorker in 1997, Robert Hughes was one of the 20th Century’s most influential cultural voices. He rose to prominence as a journalist in London during the late 1960s, and in 1970 became art critic for TIME magazine in New York. In 1980 he wrote, co-produced and presented the eight-part BBC/Time-Life television series The Shock of the New: a now-legendary examination of modern art since the Impressionists. Throughout his career, Hughes interrogated an extraordinary range of topics – from Goya to American art to the history of his native Australia – but remained a fervent champion of post-War British painting, publishing monographs on both Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. He greatly admired Riley’s ‘sharp talent’, praising the way in which her paintings ‘conserve a model of clear feeling’ for abstract art. ‘It is very exact’, he observes in The Shock of the New, ‘showing what slips can happen in the process of seeing, and how insecure the pleasure of the eye may be’ (R. Hughes, The Shock of the New, Episode 8, BBC/Time-Life, 1980). In his accompanying book of the same title, he goes on to explain that ‘the essential subject of a work by Bridget Riley is not only order but the thousand ways of subverting it … In front of a Riley, with its demanding surface of instability within order, there is no complacency; and this is as true of the weavings and swellings of colour in her wavelike paintings of the seventies as of the earlier black and white work. What seem, at first, variations of a “mere” pattern turn into metaphors of unease, uncertainties tuned with an exquisite poetic skill’ (R. Hughes, The Shock of the New, New York, 1980, p. 406).
Gifted by the artist to the celebrated critic Robert Hughes, and held in his collection ever since, Bridget Riley’s Orpheus Study 14 is exquisite example of the gouache works on paper that lie at the core of her visual enquiries. Executed in 1978, it relates to her pivotal Song of Orpheus series created that year. Following her embrace of colour in the late 1960s, the series marks the transition from three to five hues within each work, paving the way for the so-called ‘Egyptian palette’ she would begin to explore the next year. In the Orpheus works, the optical undulation of Riley’s twisting motif undermines the autonomy of each individual tone, giving rise to some of her most fluid explorations of colour and line. Comprising pencil drawing with hand-mixed ribbons of gouache, Riley’s studies played a key role in the calculation of these effects. ‘It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness’, she explains. ‘… I am watching and simultaneously recording myself looking, discovering things that on the one hand are staring me in the face and on the other I have not yet really seen … it is in this way that I assimilate experience and find new ground’ (B. Riley, ‘At the End of My Pencil’, in London Review of Books, Vol. 31, No. 19, 8 October 2009, p. 20). A further study is held in the Yale Center for British Art, with paintings from the series housed in the British Arts Council Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Described as ‘the world’s most famous art critic’ by The New Yorker in 1997, Robert Hughes was one of the 20th Century’s most influential cultural voices. He rose to prominence as a journalist in London during the late 1960s, and in 1970 became art critic for TIME magazine in New York. In 1980 he wrote, co-produced and presented the eight-part BBC/Time-Life television series The Shock of the New: a now-legendary examination of modern art since the Impressionists. Throughout his career, Hughes interrogated an extraordinary range of topics – from Goya to American art to the history of his native Australia – but remained a fervent champion of post-War British painting, publishing monographs on both Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. He greatly admired Riley’s ‘sharp talent’, praising the way in which her paintings ‘conserve a model of clear feeling’ for abstract art. ‘It is very exact’, he observes in The Shock of the New, ‘showing what slips can happen in the process of seeing, and how insecure the pleasure of the eye may be’ (R. Hughes, The Shock of the New, Episode 8, BBC/Time-Life, 1980). In his accompanying book of the same title, he goes on to explain that ‘the essential subject of a work by Bridget Riley is not only order but the thousand ways of subverting it … In front of a Riley, with its demanding surface of instability within order, there is no complacency; and this is as true of the weavings and swellings of colour in her wavelike paintings of the seventies as of the earlier black and white work. What seem, at first, variations of a “mere” pattern turn into metaphors of unease, uncertainties tuned with an exquisite poetic skill’ (R. Hughes, The Shock of the New, New York, 1980, p. 406).