Spanning over 50 years of Bridget Riley’s career, this volume explores the dialogue between black-and-white and colour in the artist’s work.


Riley gained critical attention internationally for her black-and-white paintings during the mid-1960s, using elementary shapes to engage the eye by creating flux and rhythm within the pictorial field. Throughout the succeeding decades, she has continued her investigation into perception through related bodies of work in rich colour.


This volume accompanied a focused display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2016–17), that tracks Riley’s work up to her recent reintroduction of a monochromatic palette. It includes essays by Éric de Chassey and Frances Spalding as well as a historic interview with the artist by Robert Kudielka, which together contextualise Riley’s early developments and demonstrate how her latest black-and-white paintings progress directly out of a rigorous engagement with colour.

Interviewer(s): Robert Kudielka