Bridget Riley’s first ceiling painting, Verve, 2023, was unveiled on 4 May 2023 at the British School at Rome. Covering four barrel vaults of the ceiling in the artist’s ‘Egyptian palette’, the large-scale work appears in the foyer of the BSR. Since 2016, Riley has endowed the Bridget Riley Fellowship, which provides an opportunity for a young painter to spend six months developing their work at the school. 

British School at Rome

Bridget Riley’s Untitled, 1973, is included in the exhibition No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection at the Kunsthalle Wien. The comprehensive, international group presentation revolves around the collection of modern works belonging to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, North Macedonia, as well as the historical and political context of this extraordinary project. The museum was established as part of a huge effort to rebuild the devastated city of Skopje (in former Yugoslavia), after the massive earthquake that hit in 1963. Thousands of works were donated to Skopje by artists from around the world, forming a collection which represents a time capsule of international art at a moment when modernism was in its prime.

Kunsthalle Wien

Previously at the Art Institute of Chicago, Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio will be on view at the Hammer Museum in LA from 4 February 2023. The first and most extensive institutional presentation dedicated exclusively to Riley’s drawings in over half a century, the exhibition presents approximately ninety works on paper and covers the entirety of the artist’s career, spanning her student days in the late 1940s, her groundbreaking black-and-white optical works of the early 1960s, and the innovative colour studies she has undertaken from the late 1960s to the present day. This marks the first major exhibition of her work at a West Coast museum.

We congratulate Charles Gaines and Bridget Riley on their selection into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of the highest forms of recognition of artistic merit in the United States.

An honour society of the country’s leading architects, artists, composers, and writers, the American Academy of Arts and Letters was founded in 1898. Early members include William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, Julia Ward Howe, John Singer Sargent, and Mark Twain.

American Academy of Arts and Letters

Bridget Riley considers drawing to be an essential part of her—and any—artistic practice. For more than 60 years, the British artist has created abstract, geometric paintings and drawings that challenge and delight the senses. These studies range from working drawings on graph paper to finished gouaches and serve alternately to anticipate and accompany her paintings.

Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio is the first and most extensive museum exhibition dedicated exclusively to Riley’s drawings in over half a century. The exhibition presents approximately 90 sheets from the artist’s own collection, kept as part of her dynamic studio practice. These works cover the full range of her career—from her student days in the late 1940s, when she dedicated herself exclusively to drawing courses at Goldsmiths College, through her groundbreaking black-and-white optical works of the early 1960s and the innovative colour studies she has produced from the late 1960s to the present day.

In one gallery of the exhibition, Riley has selected works from the Art Institute’s permanent collection to pay homage to the artists who have influenced her work. These include paintings and drawings by Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Georges Seurat, and others.

Art Institute of Chicago

Thames & Hudson has published Bridget Riley: Working Drawings, the first-ever book dedicated to the celebrated British artist’s working drawings. This volume richly illustrates the thinking that goes into Riley’s work through a selection of over 150 drawings, colour analyses, notations, scale studies and cartoons, most of which were exhibited at the artist’s recent seminal retrospective exhibitions in Edinburg and London from 2019 to 2020 organized by the National Galleries of Scotland. The selection spans most of Riley’s working life, tracing the origins and evolving nature of her remarkable body of work. Riley’s beginnings are also documented through selected childhood drawings, work made during and immediately following her studies at Goldsmiths’ College and the Royal College of Art, and her early explorations into abstraction.

The artist’s working method is brought into high relief in a newly commissioned conversation with Riley and Sir John Leighton, Director of the National Galleries of Scotland. The text explores the cardinal moments in the artist’s practice and the impulses that bring her work into existence. The volume also includes four previously published texts dedicated to Riley’s studies and practice written by the artist herself, art historians, curators and museum directors, which shed further light on the enduring role of drawing and the process of exploration central to her work.

Get your copy here.

We are pleased to announce that Bridget Riley's Intervals 1, 2019, is now part of the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland. 

National Gallery of Ireland