Bridget Riley’s Visionary Journey Unfolds at Hazlitt Holland Hibbert
A luminous exhibition traces the pioneering artist's profound exploration of visual perception across six decades, revealing the evolution of her revolutionary approach to colour, form and optical sensation.
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The gallery on Bury Street presents an extraordinary encounter with one of the most intellectually rigorous and visually intoxicating bodies of work in modern art. This meticulously curated exhibition brings together paintings and works spanning from 1962 through to 2015, each piece a testament to Bridget Riley’s unwavering commitment to understanding the mechanics and mysteries of human sight.
Riley’s practice emerges as a profound meditation on perception itself, a sustained investigation into how the eye receives, processes and interprets visual information. Her works possess an almost hypnotic quality, inviting the viewer into a conversation between canvas and consciousness. The exhibition’s architecture reveals three distinct yet interconnected phases of her artistic evolution, each demonstrating her fearless approach to colour relationships, geometric precision and optical vibration.
The Architecture of Vision
What becomes abundantly clear upon encountering these works is Riley’s absolute mastery of her medium. Every stripe, every modulation of tone, every carefully considered spatial relationship serves her singular vision: to render visible the invisible experience of seeing itself. The works radiate with an intellectual sophistication that never diminishes their sensory power; indeed, the two are inseparable. Standing before a Riley canvas, one becomes acutely aware of the eye’s own activity, its constant movement and adjustment, its capacity for both precision and surrender.
The exhibition demonstrates how her practice has continuously evolved whilst remaining faithful to her core concerns. From early experiments with black and white optical investigations to increasingly sophisticated explorations of chromatic sensation, Riley has consistently pushed painting towards new frontiers. Her colour sense is particularly luminous, revealing an artist who understands that colour is never inert but perpetually alive, shifting and breathing in relation to its surroundings.
The works on display reward prolonged attention and repeated viewing. Each encounter reveals new subtleties, new conversations between hues, new rhythms emerging from geometric structures. This is painting as a complex philosophical enquiry, as rigorous as mathematics yet as emotionally resonant as music.
Details
The gallery opens for Frieze on Saturday 17 October from 11:00 to 17:00, with the exhibition continuing throughout its regular hours (Monday to Friday, 10:00 to 18:00) until 27 November 2026. Hazlitt Holland Hibbert is situated at 38 Bury Street, St James’s, an elegant address befitting the calibre of work within.
Imagery courtesy of Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert (@hazlitthollandhibbert).
