Executed in 1994, Summer Shades is at once mesmeric and measured, as contrasting diagonals of colour coexist within a vibrant compositional field. An outstanding example from a series Bridget Riley began in 1986, the present work is anchored in the relationships between ribbon-like diagonals that deftly convey the artist’s career-long investigation into the perceptual qualities of colour and the visual resolution of sensation and emotion on the surface of a canvas. 1986 marked a crucial turning point in Riley’s practice: She began greatly simplifying the formal oraganisation of her paintings, adopting a diagonal compositional format. In shades evocative of a sun-drenched summer day, the present work is comprised of orange, blue, green, yellow, violet, and vermillion hues that move with clear directionality in fluid diagonal ‘zigs’ across the surface of the canvas. As art historian Michael Bracewell notes of the works in this series, “solidity and fluidity coexist within these bold and muscular paintings, seeming to push to its limit the confluence of directions of visual momentum” (Michael Bracewell, “Introducing the Art of Bridget Riley: An Act of Translation” in: Exh. Cat., London, Hayward Gallery, Bridget Riley, 2019, p. 193). Works from this pivotal series reside in prestigious institutions such as the Tate, London (Nataraja, 1993), and formed a critical part of the recent retrospective Bridget Riley at the Hayward Gallery, London and National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh between June 2019 and January 2020.

The present work builds upon Riley’s investigations into visual perception that she began in the early 1960s with her celebrated black and white paintings, before fully embracing colour in the vertical, linear compositions of the 1970s. It was only in the late 1980s that Riley began to break away from the highly minimalist, vertical compositions of her earlier corpus of work to embrace larger and bolder fields of contrasting colours. She introduced “narrow regular diagonals and then increased the scale of all units, orchestrating large areas of colour” as art historian and great friend of Riley, Robert Kudielka asserted of her new paintings in 1990 (Robert Kudielka quoted in, “According to Sensation”, in: Ibid., p. 117). In response, Riley told Kudlieka, “In the mid-1980s I felt that if I continued in the direction my work was taking it would inevitably lead to over-refinement. Those selected limitations, disciplines and attitudes which had previously provided grit and grist to my mill might now, unless I discarded them, get in the way of any real development” (Bridget Riley quoted in, “According to Sensation” in: Ibid, p. 117). The execution of the diagonal stripe paintings began with intricate studies in gouache on paper, which were then transferred onto canvas. In these works, the precise position of each field of colour is chosen by Riley in terms of proportion, contrast, and correspondence. The resulting canvases sustain a richly saturated intensity of hues that dance across the pictorial plane. Indeed, Summer Shades demonstrates Riley’s great commitment to the sheer joy of colour and rhythm in paint.

Art historical source material is pivotal to Riley’s painterly practice, and while her chromatically arresting compositions of the 1970s and 1980s draw primarily upon the colour theory of Neo-Impressionists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, in 1989 she increasingly looked to the formal concerns of Synthetic Cubism. This later phase of cubism, championed by Picasso, Braque and Gris between 1912 and 1914, embraced simpler shapes and brighter colours. When asked by Kudielka in what way she relates to the great pioneer of abstraction, Piet Mondrian, Riley responded, “Mondrian’s roots lie in Synthetic Cubism, out of this came the entire body of his work. If one looks, for instance, at Picasso’s Portrait of a Young Girl, 1914 one sees that he has eliminated the distinction between the figure and its surroundings and redefined this relationship through the collage technique as an open flowing rhythm. Mondrian turned this particular spatial quality, determined as it is by pure relationships, into the basis of a plastic art which ‘destroys’, as he puts it, any concrete assertion of the elements with which it is constructed” (Bridget Riley in conversation with Robert Kudielka, “According to Sensation” in: Ibid., p. 117). Indeed, like Picasso and Mondrian before her, Riley’s compositions of the late 1980s and 1990s exhibit increasingly deconstructed patterns that are at once geometric and rhythmic, emphasising, above all, the elements of line, form and colour. Summer Shades – and the diagonal line paintings as a coherent body of work – show Riley interrogating the techniques of early twentieth-century abstraction and pushing the boundaries of the genre further, in turn defining the greatest aspects of contemporary abstract painting.