Bridget Riley, R.A.

Private Collector, Minnesota, by whom donated to Benefit Fundraiser for the Minneapolis Institute of Art

Their sale, Sebastian Charles Auctions, Minnesota, 23 September 2025, lot 173, where acquired by the present owner

An outstanding iteration of Bridget Riley’s iconic visual vernacular, Study using three colours illustrates the artist’s masterful control of line, rhythm and colour. Executed in 1974, a pivotal moment in her oeuvre between the high-contrast black-and-white compositions of the 1960s and chromatic lyricism of her mature practice, the present work elegantly embodies Riley’s position as the undisputed leader of the Op art movement. 

“I want [people] to feel as I do, or can sometimes, to have this particular joy… My aim is to make people feel alive” (Bridget Riley cited in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Britain, Bridget Riley, 2003, p. 81).

As if strings of a musical instrument, the vertical bands of blue, green, and pink offer striking, deeply personal resonances. Having grown up by the sea in Cornwall, Riley developed a lifelong fascination with the processes by which the mind registers and interprets visual and sonic phenomena. Informed by the diverse colour theories of the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Fauvists and Futurists, each hue inflects the next in the present work, offering colour not as a static fact but as a complex structure in dialogue with space and sensory experience. Evading perspectival resolution, the symmetrical, vertical bands of Study using three colours recede and advance into pictorial space, extending the abstract field of vision beyond the picture plane. The present work, in this way, evokes the all-over canvases of the Abstract Expressionists, though in its formal clarity, embodies the unique optical rhythm that defines Riley’s practice. 

“The masses, open and closed spaces, the lines, tones and colours can be organised in a parallel way. It is as though these relationships are built up in all their complexity to provide a vehicle for those things which cannot be objectively 

identified but which can nevertheless be expressed in this way” (Paul Moorhouse cited in op. cit., p. 23).

Despite Riley’s formal precision, the effect of her work is unwaveringly elusive, hovering between stillness and movement. Articulated in a refined palette of three colours, Study using three colours illustrates Riley’s astonishing ability to create a sense of perceptual play. A modern master of colour, Riley’s oeuvre occupies a unique position not only in the history of Modern British Art but of Modernism at large, having distilled centuries of investigations into light, colour and structure into a radical, singular pictorial language.