24 Nov

Bridget Riley Exhibition

SPACE’s founding patron, Bridget Riley, “one of the most significant and original painters of our time”, has an acclaimed new show at The National Gallery.

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/

Sponsored by Bloomberg, the Sunley Room exhibition aims to allow visitors to investigate how Riley’s work relates to the National Gallery Collection.

Focussing on Bridget Riley’s most recent paintings (two of her works have been made directly on to the walls of the exhibition space), Riley and her studio will create a new wall drawing, ‘Composition with Circles 7’, especially for the longest wall of the space. In addition a version of the wall-painting, ‘Arcadia’ – last seen at the major 2008 retrospective in Paris – will be recreated on a larger scale.

From her days as a student, the National Gallery has held a special place in Riley’s artistic imagination. Time and again she has turned to compositions by the Old Masters for inspiration, learning from their uses of colour and line. The exhibition will include one of Bridget Riley’s first endeavours as an emerging artist: a copy of the Gallery’s Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) (1433) by Jan van Eyck. At Bridget’s request, a selection of paintings from the Gallery’s collection have been included in the exhibition, including Mantegna’s Introduction of the Cult of Cybele to Rome (1505–6), Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria (about 1507), and three studies by Seurat.

An accompanying film is being shown in the Sunley Room cinema