Bridget Riley

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

London, Hayward Gallery, Bridget Riley Paintings 1982-92, 1992, no. 19

Robert Kudielka, Robert Kudielka on Bridget Riley: Essays and Interviews 1972-2003, London 2005, p. 124, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is extremely minor wear to the top right and left and lower right corner tips. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Cool Place, dating from 1990, reflects one of the most radical and exciting developments within Bridget Riley’s artistic career; the discovery of the diagonal in 1986. Moving away from her previous series of works featuring vertical or horizontal coloured lines, Riley’s embrace of the diagonal liberated her from the rigidity and exactitude of the straight line, encouraging her to create paintings of extraordinary dynamism and vigour. The interaction of the slanted lines gives rise to the so-called ‘lozenges’ of colour that make up the current lot, and the eye is inexorably drawn towards the brighter segments of yellow which, when placed against the cool counterparts of blue and green, seem to leap out from the canvas. Robert Kudielka commented on the new ‘sumptuousness of colour’ in the lozenge paintings, and further notes with reference to the current lot that: ‘Cool Place… introduce[s] compositional factors which stabilise the work. There is strong emphasis on the ‘other side’ of the painting: a still area… which counters the more active entry passage on the left-hand side’ (Robert Kudielka, Robert Kudielka on Bridget Riley, Essays and Interviews 1972-2003, London 2005, p. 125).

Throughout her career Riley has been inspired by the colouristic experiments of Seurat, copying the artist’s Le Pont de Courbevoie (1886-9) in 1959: ‘By analysing a painting I hoped to follow his thought… I was trying to find out where to put what colour and why’ (Bridget Riley, in an interview with Lynne Cooke, in: Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Museé d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Bridget Riley Rétrospective, 2008, p. 143).The cool colour palette of the current lot, in which blues, greens and pinks dominate, is remarkably similar in tone to that of this earlier copy, indicating the importance of these early self-taught lessons in colour theory to the artist. The paintings of Cézanne were another source of inspiration to the artist, and in Cool Place the coloured lozenges can perhaps be seen as the direct descendants of the rectangular taches that Cezanne employed within some of his later works. Whilst inspired by the traditions of these past masters, Cool Place stands as a mesmerising example of Riley’s brilliant creative language, testament to a time of extraordinary creative dynamism in Riley’s career.