Friday 15 April 2011

Bridget Riley - Op Art part 2

This is the second part of a post on Bridget Riley, and shows examples of her colour work, which began in 1967. 
For background and biographical information on Riley see Part 1.

1967-8 Late Morning 
pva emulsion

1970 Circles 
Colour Structure Studies

1970 Circles 
Colour Structure Studies

1970 Circles 
Colour Structure Studies

1970 Circles 
Colour Structure Studies

1970 Orient 4 
acrylic

1972-3 Cantus Firmus 
acylic

1973 Paean 
acrylic

1978 Aurulum

1981 Achæan 
oil

1981 Light Between 
screenprint

1981 Shade 
oil

1981-2 Big Blue 
oil

1984 Blue Return 
oil

1987 Ease
1999 Fete 
screenprint

1999 Going Along 
oil

2000 Echo 
screenprint

2000 Start 
screenprint

Wednesday 13 April 2011

Bridget Riley - Op Art part 1

Bridget Riley is one of Britain’s best-known artists whose career has spanned over 50 years. She first came to notice in the early 1960s with monochrome paintings that explored the dynamics of optical effects.

“In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active. It was in that space, paradoxically, the painting 'took place…then, little by little, and, to some extent deliberately, I made it go the other way, opening up an interior space, as it were, so that there was a layered, shallow depth. It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly."

In 1967 Riley began experimenting with colour, and since then her paintings have examined the perception of nature by means of colour and form.

“The eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. 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 seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events.”

Riley was born in London in 1931 and was brought up in Cornwall. She studied at Goldsmiths College between 1949 – 1952 and the Royal College of Art between 1952 – 1955. In 1969 she was the first woman to win the International Prize for Painting whilst representing Britain at the 34th Venice Biennale.

She holds honorary doctorates from Oxford University, 1994, and Cambridge University, 1995. She was made a CBE in 1974 and in 1999 was awarded the Companion of Honour. In 2009 she was awarded the Kaiser Ring of the City of Goslar, Germany, one of the world’s most prestigious art prizes. Major exhibitions have included the Hayward Gallery, 1970 and 1992/94; a British Council touring retrospective in the USA, Australia and Japan, 1979; and retrospective exhibitions at Tate Britain, 2003; Museum of Modern Art in Sydney, Australia, 2005; City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand, 2005; and Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2008. She lives and works in London, Cornwall and France.

Part 1 is showing a selection of Riley's work from between 1961 and 1967.


1961 Kiss 
acrylic

1962 Blaze I 
emulsion

1963 Fall 
emulsion

1964 Hesitate 
oil

1964 Intake 
acrylic

1964 Loss 
oil

1964 White Disks 
emulsion

1965 Arrest III 
acrylic

1965 Arrest I 
emulsion

1965 Descending 
emulsion

1965 Fragment 2/10 
screenprint on perspex

1966 Breathe 
emulsion

1966 Static 2 
emulsion 

1966 Untitled, Diagonal Curve 
emulsion

1967 Cataract 3 
pva emulsion

1967 Deny II 
pva emulsion

Monday 11 April 2011

Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell (1915 – 1991) was an abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. He was one of the youngest of the New York School (a phrase he coined), which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston.

Motherwell was born 1915, in Aberdeen, Washington. In 1932 he studied painting briefly at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. He received a B.A. from Stanford University in 1937 and enrolled for graduate work later that year in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He travelled to Europe in 1938 for a year of study abroad. His first solo show was presented at the Raymond Duncan Gallery in Paris in 1939.

In September of 1940 he settled in New York, where he entered Columbia University to study art history with Meyer Schapiro, who encouraged him to become a painter. In 1941, Motherwell traveled to Mexico with Roberto Matta for six months. After returning to New York, his circle came to include William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann and Jackson Pollock In 1942, Motherwell was included in the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion, New York. In 1944, Motherwell became editor of the Documents of Modern Art series of books, and he contributed frequently to the literature on Modern art from that time.

He preferred using the starkness of black paint as one of the basic elements of his paintings. He was known to frequently employ the technique of diluting his paint with turpentine to create a shadow effect. His long-running series of paintings "Elegies for the Spanish Republic" is generally considered his most significant project. The origin of imagery for the Spanish Elegies is in Motherwell's 1948 black-and-white illustration for a poem by Harold Rosenberg in the avant-garde periodical, Possibilities. After many experiments in these abstract illuminations, the pattern emerged of black vertical and oval shapes against a white backdrop. These forms were reworked over the years until they were painted in monumental scale in the late 1950s, a time of prolific and brilliant activity in Motherwell's career.

A solo exhibition of Motherwell’s work was held at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, New York, in 1944. In 1946, he began to associate with Herbert Ferber, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, and spent his first summer in East Hampton, Long Island. This year, Motherwell was given solo exhibitions at the Arts Club of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Art, and he participated in Fourteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artist subsequently taught and lectured throughout the United States, and continued to exhibit extensively in the United States and abroad. A Motherwell exhibition took place at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1976–77. He was given important solo exhibitions at the Royal Academy, London, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1978. A retrospective of his works organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, traveled in the United States from 1983 to 1985. From 1971, the artist lived and worked in Greenwich, Connecticut. He died in 1991 in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.


 1941 Composition


 1943 Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive


 1944 Untitled 
screenprint


 1955 Je t'aime #11


 1957-1960 Elegy to the Spanish Republic # 57


 1958 Chambre d'Amour


 1958 Iberia No. II


 1958 Two Figures


 1959 Monster (For Charles Ives)


 1961 Elegy to the Spanish Republic #70


 1963 Automatic Image #1


 1967 Elegy to the Spanish Republic, Basque Elegy


 1967 Untitled 
lithograph


 1969 Open #50, In Orange with Black


1969 Open no.122 in Scarlet and Blue


 1970 Africa 3
 screenprint


 1973 Collage in Ochre with Blue and Red


 1975-1985 Elegy to the Spanish Republic #132


 1979 St Michel III


 1984 America-La France Variations II 
lithograph and collage


 1989 Hollow Man series