Elongated Triangles 1 (1971) by Bridget Riley sets groups of vertical bands in cobalt blue, crimson and white against a cream ground, the stripes clustered in pairs and triplets with generous white intervals between them so that the arrangement reads as a series of discrete columns in place of a continuous field. The blue and red sit in direct complementary opposition, each intensifying the other at every boundary, the white passages between the groups giving the eye just enough relief before the next cluster reasserts the contrast.

The title describes the formal logic precisely — the bands are triangular in section, tapering slightly from top to bottom, the taper so gradual that it registers as a barely perceptible narrowing in contrast to a dramatic perspectival effect. It was a device Riley had developed through the late 1960s as a way of introducing spatial tension into the stripe without abandoning its essential flatness — the bands remaining read as flat colour while the tapering introduces an ambiguity about whether the plane is advancing or receding. Colour, introduced here for the first time in the series, adds a further layer to that ambiguity, the warm red and cool blue pulling in opposite spatial directions simultaneously.

Elongated Triangles 1 belongs to a pivotal group of works in which Riley committed to colour as a structural force for the first time, the investigations that followed — Firebird, the Coloured Greys series, the Dominance prints — all building directly on what was learned here.

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