Bridget Riley Prints For Sale

Bridget Riley is one of the most important British artists of the post-war period and a defining figure in the history of abstract and Op Art. Born in Norwood, London in 1931 and shaped in part by a childhood spent in Cornwall — whose shifting light and coastal landscapes left a lasting influence on her understanding of colour and perception — Riley studied at Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art before dedicating herself entirely to painting in the late 1950s. Her work is held in the collections of the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago, among dozens of other major institutions worldwide.

Her breakthrough came with Movement in Squares in 1961 — a black-and-white painting of alternating rectilinear forms that compress and expand as they approach the canvas edge, creating a powerful illusion of spatial movement. It announced a practice built entirely on the phenomenon of visual perception: Riley’s art does not depict the world but acts directly on the eye, creating sensations of rhythm, vibration and depth through the precise arrangement of form and colour. This was Op Art — Optical Art — and Riley became its most rigorous and celebrated practitioner.

The early works of the 1960s were monochromatic: geometric patterns of black and white that produced destabilising visual effects through contrast and repetition. In 1967 she introduced colour, and the subsequent decades saw her explore the visual possibilities of the stripe, wave, lozenge and interval through increasingly complex relationships of colour, rhythm and movement. Her Venice Biennale Prize for Painting in 1968 confirmed her international standing at the moment her colour work first reached its full intensity.

Alex Yellop specialise in original Bridget Riley prints and works on paper, spanning early black-and-white compositions through to the major colour series of the later decades. Whether acquiring a first Riley or refining an established collection, her prints remain among the defining works of post-war British abstraction.

For information on available Bridget Riley prints for sale, contact our London dealership via info@alexyellop.com. 

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