A captivating new exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate demonstrates that smaller, carefully curated shows can sometimes be more powerful than comprehensive surveys. "Bridget Riley: Learning to See" presents an invigorating and magical collection of 26 works spanning from the 1960s to the present day, featuring an expertly arranged mix of large canvases, preparatory studies, and works painted directly onto gallery walls. This focused presentation sharpens viewers' attention and enhances their visual perception in ways that few exhibitions achieve.
Riley's paintings create an immediate and arresting visual impact that stops viewers in their tracks. The longer one observes these works, the more they reveal hidden depths and appear to transform before the observer's eyes. As viewers become increasingly captivated by the optical effects, the paintings become more rewarding and engaging. The initial response often involves questioning the technical methods: how are the colors organized, and what underlying logic governs their construction? However, the works also create profound effects on the viewer's nervous system, operating in the mysterious space between eye and brain, between perception and its lingering afterimage.
One of the exhibition's standout pieces, "Dancing to the Music of Time" (2022), originally created as a large wall drawing for a museum in Canberra, demonstrates Riley's masterful manipulation of color values. When viewers first approach the work, the colors appear dull and muted, but each painted disc gradually begins to emit a silvery glow around its edges. The visual experience becomes disorienting as viewers find themselves unable to remember the previous color while examining the next one, creating a sensation of being lost in musical rhythms. Another wall drawing titled "Angel" features discs in stately rotating alignments that possess the brevity, apparent simplicity, and inevitability reminiscent of piano phrases by Erik Satie. These works are simultaneously simple and complex, creating a mesmerizing effect that holds viewers captive.
The 94-year-old artist's work demands active physical engagement from viewers, requiring them to move closer and step back repeatedly to fully experience the optical systems and underlying logic. Despite attempts at analytical observation, the paintings continue to affect viewers on a physical and phenomenological level. Riley's art serves as a reminder that humans are embodied beings moving through space and perceiving the world through their entire physical presence. The exhibition space itself contributes to this experience, with a horizon visible between sea and sky through the balcony window, while Riley's painted horizons on the opposite wall multiply and shift, slipping away just as viewers attempt to pin them down.
These works transcend simple optical illusions or eye exercises. Riley creates an acute awareness of time's ability to lengthen and compress, making viewers conscious of their positioning, their approach and retreat, and how she guides their eye movements up and down, from one work to another. This process repeats continuously, even when focusing on a single piece. The artist generates both movement and a commanding sense of immutable stillness through her carefully orchestrated turning points, axes, intervals, and multiplying bands of color that she orders, reorders, and repeats with mathematical precision.
"Arrest 3" from 1965 exemplifies Riley's mastery with its perfectly calibrated, wave-like rhythm that creates the same type of optical puzzle found in patterns on Moorish tiled floors. "Streak 3" (1980) presents even more complex and dense curving colored lines that flow together and apart, pulling the viewer's eye across swells of cross-currents while an undertow sensation carries them along. The closely packed vertical lines in "Pharaoh," painted just last year, are anchored by eight regularly spaced white intervals that create moments where viewers hold their breath until stepping away provides relief, like coming up for air.
Riley's recent "Current" paintings create the visual effect of observing triangular patterns through the distorting ripples of glazed glass. Larger triangles and serpentine rhythms seem to proliferate more in the viewer's mind than on the actual painted surfaces. Two paintings both titled "Late Morning" – one a broad canvas filled with horizontal elements from 1967-8, the other featuring tightly packed verticals from 1978 – cause viewers to perceive bulges and irregularities where none actually exist, sometimes requiring hands-and-knees examination to verify what is real. The temporal titles raise questions about whether time sweeps toward the painting's edges, with the past receding to one side while advancing and brightening into an undefined future on the other, leaving viewers lost in an incomprehensible middle ground.
Throughout her extensive career, Riley has maintained the belief that modern artists should contribute to the art of their time, even if that contribution seems small. Her impact has grown significantly over the decades through her singular focus on the acts of looking and seeing, which she treats as distinctly different processes. While seeing might consist of what Willem de Kooning once described as "a slipping glimpse," Riley extends both the glimpse and the slippage into prolonged and repeated acts of concentrated looking. She transforms focused attention into reverie, leaving viewers amazed, open, and surprised by the continuous desire to keep looking.
"Bridget Riley: Learning to See" runs at Turner Contemporary in Margate from November 22 through May 4, offering visitors an opportunity to experience one of Britain's most significant living artists at the height of her powers. The exhibition confirms Riley's position as a master of optical art whose work continues to challenge and reward careful observation.
