Bridget Riley: Measure for Measure. New Disc Paintings

More than half a century after her first groundbreaking works of Op Art in the early 1960s, Bridget Riley is still working on the edges of perception, exploring the interactions of form and colour in her paintings. For her 2017 exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler in Paris, titled Measure for Measure, she installed eight canvases and two wall works, one of them more than four meters wide. In these works, all part of her series of Disc Paintings (2016–2017), coloured discs are arranged in a diagonal grid, their palette – a greyed off-green, off-violet, and off-orange – inspired by pointillist artist George Seurat. The colours oscillate depending on the neighbouring hues and their position within the grid, lending each work a different mood. The series is both “a result of Riley looking one more time at Seurat” and an “exploration of the visual effects obtained by the repetition on a limited surface of discs which vary only in colour”, as Éric de Chassey points out in his richly illustrated essay. He outlines Riley’s developing interrogations involving first black and white, then coloured discs during various work phases.