Bridget Riley painting leads Bonhams sale
Myrrh by Bridget Riley (B. 1931) leads Bonhams’ 20th/21st Century Art Evening sale on April 2 at Bonhams New Bond Street, London. The work, painted in 1985, has an estimate of £1,500,000-2,500,000.
British artist Bridget Riley is recognised for her lifelong engagement with abstraction and painting reduced to its essentials. She pioneered the Op Art movement in the 1960s, an abstract style which used optical illusions that can give the viewer the impression of movement, hidden images or vibrating patterns.
Pared-back and simple black and white shapes are characteristic of Riley’s early work in the 1960s, yet from 1967, colours emerged into her practice and marked a turning point in her work. In 1981, Riley’s colour palette was further inspired by the colourful hieroglyphics she saw during a trip to Egypt. She coined the term ‘Egyptian Palette’ to describe her use of colours, exclaiming that ‘the colours are purer and more brilliant than any I had used before’.
Speaking of her exploration of colour generally, Riley commented: “At the core of colour lies a paradox. It is simultaneously one thing and several things – you can never see colour by itself, it is always affected by other colours…Colour relationships in painting depend on the interactive character of colour; this is its essential nature.”
At 93 years old, Bridget Riley continues to make art. Her works are in numerous museum collections, including in the Tate, London, the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam amongst others.
Ralph Taylor, Global Head of 20th and 21st Century Art at Bonhams, commented: “This exceptional work by Bridget Riley is from one of the most important periods of her career. The distinctive palette choices mark this clearly as an ‘Egypt series’ painting, amongst the most highly sought after works in her long and illustrious career. Riley is one of the greatest living artists globally and so we expect this to excite collectors from all around the globe.”