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Lot Essay
Held in the same private collection for almost four decades, Bridget Riley’s Recollection (1986) is a tour de force of colour and form. The canvas is structured through a kaleidoscopic series of interlocking rhomboids, forming a dynamic and immersive visual syncopation. With its colourful field of tessellating parallelograms, rendered in a dizzying spectrum of variegated hues, Recollection is indicative of the new directions pursued by Bridget Riley from 1986 onwards.
1986 marked a turning point in Riley’s artistic practice, when she introduced diagonal compositions in a celebrated series that emphasized dynamism and movement, departing from the static, linear structures of her earlier work. Recollection, one of the first of this important and ground-breaking series, reflects this exploration, as sweeping, ribbon-like diagonal planes and rhythmic patterns of vivid colour converge across the pristine canvas surface. Radiant and rhythmically charged, the present work unfolds in a luminous interplay of golden yellow and glowing orange, interlaced with rich turquoise, lilac and flashes of coral and fresh teal green, the contrasting hues generating a vibrant optical shimmer across the surface. Works from this pivotal series are in prestigious institutional collections including the Tate, London (Nataraja, 1993) and Josef Albers Museum, Quadrat Bottrop (Stream of Change, 1987), and formed an important part of the artist’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London in 2019.
Moving away from the thin vertical stripes that had defined her practice since the 1960s, Riley hit upon a new structure through which to channel her ground-breaking optical investigations. Known colloquially in the studio as ‘zigs’, these diagonal squares allowed Riley to engage in new ways with the distinctive, vivid palette she had adopted following her formative trip to Egypt in the winter of 1979-80. The edge-to-edge contact between vertical stripes in her earlier oeuvre had allowed her to observe the shifting identity of her chosen chromatic values through a simple economy of means. However, as her tonal spectrum broadened throughout the 1980s, Riley sought more rigorous formal units through which to examine the spatial and dynamic properties of her palette. Connected to one another via four edges – rather than two, as in the stripes – Riley’s zigs allow her colours to interact in multiple shifting configurations, existing as individual units or merging into larger blocks. The cascading lozenges shatter the picture plane into myriad fragments, dramatically compounding the sense of push and pull between competing tonalities.
The execution of these diagonal stripe paintings began with intricate studies in gouache, which were then transferred onto canvas. In these works, the precise position of each field of colour is chosen by Riley in terms of proportion, contrast, and correspondence. The resulting canvases sustain a richly saturated intensity of hues that dance across the pictorial plane. Indeed, Recollection demonstrates Riley’s great commitment to the sheer joy of colour and rhythm in paint.
Drawing on influences from Georges Seurat’s Pointillism to the dynamism of the Italian Futurists, Bridget Riley has devoted her career to orchestrating colour through precise juxtaposition, releasing the inherent energy of contrasting tones. Inspired, too, by the all-over compositions of Jackson Pollock - particularly after seeing his 1958 retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery - Riley transformed Abstract Expressionism’s turbulence into a disciplined, structured abstraction. In Recollection, this synthesis takes shape in pulsating parallelograms and geometric rhythm, fusing Seurat’s colour logic with Pollock’s immersive engagement with the canvas. The result is a visual experience that oscillates between repeated geometry and optical brilliance. As the artist herself explained “I do not select single colours but rather pairs, triads or groups of colour. By which I mean that the colours are organised on the canvas so that the eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. Vision can be arrested, tripped up or pulled back in order to float free again” (B. Riley in exhibition catalogue, Bridget Riley, London, Tate Britain, 2003, p. 213).
In Recollection, the result is a closely woven pictorial space in which colour becomes rhythm, pulsing in syncopated counterpoint with its neighbouring forces. This sense of disturbed equilibrium produces an almost electrical charge that causes the canvas to thrum from end-to-end. These shifting perceptual states act upon both the retina and the psyche, inducing agitation and meditation in equal measure. Through these mechanisms, works such as Recollection play with both sight and feeling, simulating and amplifying the way in which we engage with the world around us. They are multi-sensory laboratories in which the inner properties of colour – its energy, its depth, its resonance – are laid bare.
1986 marked a turning point in Riley’s artistic practice, when she introduced diagonal compositions in a celebrated series that emphasized dynamism and movement, departing from the static, linear structures of her earlier work. Recollection, one of the first of this important and ground-breaking series, reflects this exploration, as sweeping, ribbon-like diagonal planes and rhythmic patterns of vivid colour converge across the pristine canvas surface. Radiant and rhythmically charged, the present work unfolds in a luminous interplay of golden yellow and glowing orange, interlaced with rich turquoise, lilac and flashes of coral and fresh teal green, the contrasting hues generating a vibrant optical shimmer across the surface. Works from this pivotal series are in prestigious institutional collections including the Tate, London (Nataraja, 1993) and Josef Albers Museum, Quadrat Bottrop (Stream of Change, 1987), and formed an important part of the artist’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London in 2019.
Moving away from the thin vertical stripes that had defined her practice since the 1960s, Riley hit upon a new structure through which to channel her ground-breaking optical investigations. Known colloquially in the studio as ‘zigs’, these diagonal squares allowed Riley to engage in new ways with the distinctive, vivid palette she had adopted following her formative trip to Egypt in the winter of 1979-80. The edge-to-edge contact between vertical stripes in her earlier oeuvre had allowed her to observe the shifting identity of her chosen chromatic values through a simple economy of means. However, as her tonal spectrum broadened throughout the 1980s, Riley sought more rigorous formal units through which to examine the spatial and dynamic properties of her palette. Connected to one another via four edges – rather than two, as in the stripes – Riley’s zigs allow her colours to interact in multiple shifting configurations, existing as individual units or merging into larger blocks. The cascading lozenges shatter the picture plane into myriad fragments, dramatically compounding the sense of push and pull between competing tonalities.
The execution of these diagonal stripe paintings began with intricate studies in gouache, which were then transferred onto canvas. In these works, the precise position of each field of colour is chosen by Riley in terms of proportion, contrast, and correspondence. The resulting canvases sustain a richly saturated intensity of hues that dance across the pictorial plane. Indeed, Recollection demonstrates Riley’s great commitment to the sheer joy of colour and rhythm in paint.
Drawing on influences from Georges Seurat’s Pointillism to the dynamism of the Italian Futurists, Bridget Riley has devoted her career to orchestrating colour through precise juxtaposition, releasing the inherent energy of contrasting tones. Inspired, too, by the all-over compositions of Jackson Pollock - particularly after seeing his 1958 retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery - Riley transformed Abstract Expressionism’s turbulence into a disciplined, structured abstraction. In Recollection, this synthesis takes shape in pulsating parallelograms and geometric rhythm, fusing Seurat’s colour logic with Pollock’s immersive engagement with the canvas. The result is a visual experience that oscillates between repeated geometry and optical brilliance. As the artist herself explained “I do not select single colours but rather pairs, triads or groups of colour. By which I mean that the colours are organised on the canvas so that the eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. Vision can be arrested, tripped up or pulled back in order to float free again” (B. Riley in exhibition catalogue, Bridget Riley, London, Tate Britain, 2003, p. 213).
In Recollection, the result is a closely woven pictorial space in which colour becomes rhythm, pulsing in syncopated counterpoint with its neighbouring forces. This sense of disturbed equilibrium produces an almost electrical charge that causes the canvas to thrum from end-to-end. These shifting perceptual states act upon both the retina and the psyche, inducing agitation and meditation in equal measure. Through these mechanisms, works such as Recollection play with both sight and feeling, simulating and amplifying the way in which we engage with the world around us. They are multi-sensory laboratories in which the inner properties of colour – its energy, its depth, its resonance – are laid bare.