CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/16/2019

Dazzling discharges of light in Paul Moorehouse's new early-years biography of Bridget Riley

Featured image, a detail from a 1963 contact sheet by Ida Kar, captures Op Art pioneer Bridget Riley inside Continuum (1963), the only three-dimensional work the artist ever realized (image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London). It is reproduced from Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person, art historian and former NPG Senior Curator Paul Moorhouse's compelling new ealy-years biography. Inspired by the way that Monet’s Water Lilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris produced a field of color capable of enveloping the viewer, Continuum "destabilized the viewer’s field of vision," Moorehouse writes. "The dynamic action of expanding and contracting chevron shapes produced hallucinatory movements, undulations in space and unpredictable, dazzling discharges of light. But in a further development, while standing inside Continuum the viewer could turn around and shift their gaze within an enclosed space. That expanded view powerfully augmented the sensation of being ‘devoured.’ In effect, virtual space and real space had overlapped and merged. The result was an all-encompassing intensification, generating an experience at once perceptual and uncompromisingly physical."