Dia Beacon to Revisit Bridget Riley’s Early Black-and-White Paintings
This summer, Dia Beacon will turn its attention to the years that made Bridget Riley one of the most consequential figures in post-war abstraction. The museum is preparing an exhibition of Riley’s black-and-white paintings from 1961 to 1967, a body of work that helped define Op art and established the visual language she would continue to refine for decades.
Bridget Riley (b. 1931) built her reputation on paintings that appear deceptively simple at first glance. Through tightly controlled lines, repeated forms, and calibrated contrasts, her work produces a sense of motion that seems to shift as the viewer moves. That emphasis on perception has long been central to Riley’s practice, and it was part of what made her a major presence in the 1960s, including through “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, the exhibition that brought Op art into wider public view and later appeared on the cover of Time.
Dia curatorial associate Emily Markert said Riley’s early paintings show how “self-imposed limitations on color palette and formal vocabulary proved generative for the artist, and laid the groundwork for the next six decades of her career.” The exhibition will make that argument visually, tracing how restraint became a source of expansion in Riley’s hands.
The article also places Riley within a broader field of contemporary artists working with geometry, repetition, and optical instability. Cristina Ghetti, an Argentine painter based in Valencia, Spain, describes Riley, Lygia Clark, and Sonia Delaunay as her “artistic sisters.” Her painting Double Wave Black (2017), with its black-and-white bands bending across a shaped surface, extends that conversation between order and variation. Andy Harwood, based in Ipswich, Queensland, Australia, describes his own paintings as “a study of the mechanics of vision,” using translucent color and nested geometry to create the sensation of planes advancing and receding.
Myles Bennett, based in New York, approaches the canvas from another angle, using an X-Acto knife to deconstruct its surface. The article also notes the collaborative practice of Anoka Faruqee and David Driscoll, whose work further underscores how Riley’s legacy continues to inform artists interested in perception, material, and the unstable edge between structure and movement.
More than six decades after Riley first emerged, her work still offers a precise lesson in how painting can activate the eye. Dia Beacon’s exhibition suggests that her early experiments remain not only historically important, but newly legible in the work of artists still testing the limits of abstraction.
