February 5-May 28, 2023 at Westwood’s Hammer Museum
“Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio,” presented by the Hammer Museum at UCLA, will feature several never-before-seen works by the English painter. The exhibition will open on Feb. 5, 2023.
Organized in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, the show includes more than 90 sheets from Riley’s private collection and will be on view through May 28. This is the first and most extensive American museum exhibition in half a century dedicated exclusively to Riley’s drawing.
“Although she is best known for her remarkable abstract paintings, drawing is an essential aspect of Bridget Riley’s artistic practice,” Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum. “This is of particular interest to the Hammer, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Morgan Library & Museum, all of which have a deep commitment to collecting, exhibiting and studying works on paper.”
The exhibition is curated by Cynthia Burlingham, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs, Hammer Museum; Jay A. Clarke, Rothman Family Curator, Prints and Drawings, Art Institute of Chicago; and Rachel Federman, associate curator, Modern and Contemporary Drawings, Morgan Library and Museum.
Riley’s early student drawings made in the 1950s drew inspiration from the human form and nature to establish the foundation for her investigation of pure abstraction. In 1960 Riley moved abruptly from making representational drawings to creating purely abstract sheets that depict meticulously composed geometric forms in black and white. Although it marked a stark departure from her early figurative and landscape work, this new direction was in fact a solution to Riley’s earlier efforts to find a pictorial structure equivalent to vision itself. These studies range from working drawings on graph paper to finished gouaches and serve to anticipate her paintings. The drawings, along with a small selection of paintings, reflect what Riley considers an essential part of her, and any, artistic practice. She has described the process of drawing “as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness.”
In the late 1960s Riley shifted from employing exclusively black, white, and gray circles, squares, and triangles to include color in her energetic horizontal and vertical compositions. Her aim was to investigate visual perception and light effects through the adjacent placement of hues. In her stripes, whether horizontal, vertical, diagonal, or curved, Riley uses color to guide our optical sensations. Line, in her words, is “the basis of what you might call a color vocabulary, as Seurat used the dot.” Beginning in the mid-1970s, Riley explored an expanded range of color for her stripes.
“Reviewing and selecting works from the extensive body of drawings retained in Bridget’s studio has broadened and deepened our understanding of her practice and the larger context for her art,” shared Cynthia Burlingham, deputy director of curatorial affairs and exhibition curator for the Hammer Museum.
