How Bridget Riley’s 1965 painting Arrest 4 marked her first steps towards colour

It was while examining rock pools on the Cornish coast that Bridget Riley realised she was different from other children. Struck by the play of light on water, speckled and starred with an infinite array of colours, ‘I sensed that I got an extra pleasure out of looking,’ she says. Those spectral visions have come to define her career, one singularly preoccupied with the act of looking for more than 75 years.

This lifelong enquiry is the focus of Bridget Riley: Learning to See at the Turner Contemporary in Margate (until 4 May 2026). The exhibition is different from previous retrospectives in that it focuses, through a sequence of works, on Riley’s enduring connection with the natural world and her career-long study of the sensory experience of sight. The gallery is situated, appropriately enough, on a beach overlooking the sea, where, on a clear day, the waves roll like silken flags of pale grey and green. Riley’s perfectly calibrated paintings do the same. There is a lovely sense of inner movement: patterns shift across the canvas like beads of mercury gently sliding around a petri dish, making the eyes swim.

One of the key paintings in the exhibition is Arrest 3, from 1965: a wave-like rhythm of greys running from charcoal to silver. It twists and buckles, humming with the intensity of a theremin. The artwork is one of four ‘Arrest’ paintings Riley made that year, marking a turning point in her practice. Hints of blue ripple through the spectrum, signalling the beginnings of her shift from monochrome to colour. The artist has written of her subsequent realisation that the principles of her black-and-white works — ‘contrast, harmony, reversal, repetition, movement, rhythm’ — could be ‘recast in colour and with a new freedom’.

Asked about the title, Riley said, ‘I have called the whole series “Arrest”, because the dropping or rising movement could be very fast but has been “arrested” in its movement.’

Offered on 5 March in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale at Christie’s is Arrest 4, a vertical companion to Arrest 3. It is the final work in the series, and the only one to remain in private hands. Riley has often spoken of her works in terms of rhythm and harmony, and here the lines flow downward, their rise and fall comparable to the music of a concerto.

The year Riley painted the ‘Arrest’ series was an important one for her internationally. The artist was featured in the landmark Op Art exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her 1961 painting Movement in Squares appeared on the catalogue cover, and it launched the young artist into the public consciousness. Suddenly, her explorations into perceptual instability captured the spirit of the 1960s — a decade of heightened subjectivity and vitality.

In the era of the Space Race, Riley’s cosmic paintings seemed to open the doors to other worlds. Their optical disturbances lingered like after-images on the retina, conjuring planetary atmospheres in clouds of royal crimson and purple.

The fame, however, was double-edged: versions of her paintings appeared on T-shirts and dresses, and loomed in the background in nightclubs. Riley realised it would take another 20 years for the public to see her artworks as something more considered. Few appreciated the allusions to music or to Old Master paintings — particularly, in relation to the ‘Arrest’ series, the frieze The Introduction of the Cult of Cybele at Rome (1505-06) by the Renaissance painter Mantegna, which Riley described as ‘one long all-embracing rhythm’.

The artist’s reputation continued to grow through the late 1960s, with Arrest 4 playing a significant role in this trajectory. In 1968, Riley represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, becoming the first living British artist to be awarded the International Prize for Painting. In 1970-71, the painting featured in her critically acclaimed touring retrospective to Germany, Italy and the Hayward Gallery in London. The art critic Robert Melville wrote in the The New Statesman that ‘No painter, alive or dead, has ever made us more conscious of our eyes than Bridget Riley.’

By this point, Riley was beginning to use colour in a radical way. Visits to India, and later Egypt, expanded her palette to warm pinks, yellows and blues. The paintings retained the sharp clarity of her earlier monochromes, but now they overwhelmed the senses with a glorious sublimity. Asked how she achieved such effects, Riley replied, ‘I try to organise a field of visual energy which accumulates until it reaches maximum tension.’

Riley’s paintings never settle into fixed objects; they remain continuously in flux. More than seven decades after that childhood discovery on the Cornish coast, she continues to remind us that looking is not a passive act, but one alive to infinite possibilities.

Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art auctions take place in London and online, from 25 February to 19 March 2026. Explore the preview exhibition and sales

Related artists: Bridget Riley