In 1939, when Bridget Riley was eight, her mother took her and her sister to live in a cottage on the north coast of Cornwall. One day, bathing in a rockpool, Bridget was struck by the ‘colours of the seaweed and anemones and other little things in it, and at the same time, there was a reflection from the cliff above.’ She described it as being like ‘swimming through a diamond.’ Twenty years later, in 1959, she made an enlarged copy of Georges Seurat’s The Bridge at Courbevoie, examining the artist’s neo-Impressionist credence that the viewer would have a more intense experience if pure colour was applied directly to the canvas in points, instead of being mixed on a palette.
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Now 94, Bridget is still working, retaining studios in London, the south of France, and Cornwall. ‘And at the core of her pioneering practice is how we perceive and encounter colour,’ explains Melissa Blanchflower, the curator of Bridget Riley at Turner Contemporary (November 22 – May 4 2026). Melissa has collaborated closely with Bridget on the show, and it is less a traditional, chronologically presented retrospective than an observation of Bridget’s belief that ‘abstraction doesn’t have a space or time attached.’
For Bridget uses her past works as prompts, and ‘we’re drawing visual and conceptual connections between work from the early 1960s with works made in last twenty years,’ states Melissa. Notably, Bridget was, for a period back then, using monochrome, creating paintings that were unlike anything that any British artist had produced before, and which were dubbed ‘op art’, short for optical art. ‘Black and white are very stable, and she was using them to look at the instability of form and shape and structure,’ says Melissa, of the canvases that seem to bulge and undulate before the viewer’s eyes. When Bridget re-introduced colour, it was to show how a similar range of sensations can be provoked, depending on the colours used and how they’re employed. The connection to nature is absolute, and dazzling: ‘for me, nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces – an event rather than an appearance,’ she once said. And Melissa refers us to a pair of paintings from the Early Morning series, one in the horizontal stripes of a shimmering horizon, the other vertical, like long blades of dew-tipped grass. ‘The effects you get are very different – because they release light differently.’
Bridget’s works have always been painted by hand, they are not hard-edged painting practiced by her contemporaries in the 60s and 70s. There’s a strong element of intuition in their arrangement, and Bridget maps out each composition on paper, before it is put down on canvas by assistants – mirroring the Renaissance atelier model. The exhibition features a clutch of these preparatory pieces, as well as sixteen canvases. These include works from her ‘Egyptian’ series, informed by the fixed palette that evolved under the bright, North African light, unified a whole culture for over 3000 years, and has since become a core refrain for Bridget. There are also four monumental wall paintings, adapted to Turner Contemporary’s dimensions, which are, for Bridget, a means of expanding beyond the limitations of a canvas to create a whole environment.
Notably, this is not the only Bridget Riley exhibition currently running. The Musee d’Orsay in Paris is staging Bridget Riley: Starting Point, looking closely at Seurat’s influence (until January 25). And at Tate Britain, a new display has been assembled around Concerto I, a recent painting that Bridget generously donated to the nation in July (until June 7). But it is only in Margate that, beyond the windows of the gallery, the visitor can experience how light and colour play off the sea, and the seaweed, and the cliff.
