Bridget Riley at Tate Britain

The presentation of two new (ok, 2024 and 2025) paintings by Bridget Riley is rather a special event. Overlapping with the recent Paris exhibition and the show at Turner Margate, Bridget has been quite in the news lately.

This single room focus at Tate Britain is an opportunity to see her work doing what it does best - convincing your brain it is seeing something other than what your eyes tell you.

By continually experimenting with how we see colours and how we read the reactions between them, Riley has created a body of work that challenges our notions of seeing and understanding space and colour, and she has been doing this for over 60 years now!

This showing gives us both the then and now - the inclusion of Fall, a major early work from 1963, alongside these newest paintings, Concerto I and Concerto II, offers a demonstration of how strong the recent examples are, plus what to me at least was a new departure. 

By allowing some of the colours in the new paintings to abruptly end and become a different colour changes a basic building block of Riley's painting. In the past, a coloured line or space has continued, its function being to act with the colours alongside it to create either another colour in our vision, or to activate the surface of the painting, to give the vibrations. By changing colours, the effect changes - a blue bordered by pinks gives one effect, but when the blue stops and mustard yellow starts, then the relationship with the pinks and thus their part in the whole changes too.

So, bravo to Bridget for still evolving and creating at the age of 94. Let's have some more!