MARGATE.- Turner Contemporary opened Learning to See, an exhibition by Bridget Riley, conceived in close collaboration with the artist. The exhibition title chosen by Riley comes from one of Monet’s letters to Eugène Boudin, written late in life, thanking Boudin for being the first to teach him ‘to see and understand’.
Surveying Riley’s enduring connection with the natural world and her career-long study of the sensory experience of sight, Learning to See includes works from the late 60s, her most recent canvases, and wall paintings from the last decade. The exhibition also brings together preparatory works on paper showing how the practice of drawing has underpinned her working life.
For over sixty years, Riley has developed a distinctive visual language rooted in colour, form and rhythm, subjects inspired by her experience of living on the Cornish coast as a child. Affirming her observation that nature is not merely landscape but ‘the dynamism of visual forces – an event rather than an appearance’, the exhibition offers an opportunity to view Riley’s work against the context of the ever-shifting light, skies and tides of Margate.
Riley works closely with the sight lines and approaches afforded by Turner Contemporary’s modernist, light-focussed gallery architecture, and the ways a work may respond to the point from which it is experienced by the viewer. On the installation of a major new Intervals wall painting within the exhibition, Riley notes that the ‘unusual deployment of the galleries gives us the chance to see things differently’.
Learning to See gathers paintings from different periods of Riley’s work, not to trace a linear progression of the artist’s practice, but to explore her ongoing evolution. The recurrence of motifs such as the line, curve, circle and triangle connect work across her career, allowing a dynamic dialogue between past and present. These motifs reveal how Riley continues to re-engage with earlier works, sometimes decades later, transforming them into new paintings. In the 1960s, the artist established the basis of her formal vocabulary with her black-and-white paintings and in 1967, she introduced colour into her work, thus expanding the perceptual range.
Such correspondences can be seen in the selection, which includes Winter Palace (1981, Leeds Museums and Galleries) and Silvered Painting 2 (2023, Private Collection); Arrest 3 (1965, Glasgow Life Museums) and Streak 3 (1980, Private Collection) in which different curves relate to the present Dark Colours series. A new painting Pharaoh (2024) based on Study 1 for ‘Sultan’ painting (1983) similarly extends Riley’s engagement with her Egyptian palette.
Bridget Riley is one of Britain’s most influential artists working today, and her studio practice remains ground-breaking.
Born in London in 1931, she gained international recognition in 1965 through her participation in The Responsive Eye exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and at the Venice Biennale in 1968 in which she was awarded the International Prize for Painting.
This exhibition at Turner Contemporary celebrates the clarity and energy of Riley’s exploration of visual sensation – a continuum of thought and vision that remains as vital today as when it began in the 1960s.
Riley cites Monet’s letter to his good friend, the statesman, Georges Clemenceau, ‘Nothing but appearance can give us the truth – or what we can know of it.’
Clarrie Wallis, Director of Turner Contemporary, said: 'Bridget Riley has transformed our understanding of how we look and see. This exhibition invites us to engage with the very act of perception itself, revealing how her paintings make vision a dynamic, sensory experience.'
Learning to See is curated by Melissa Blanchflower, Senior Curator, Turner Contemporary and Bridget Riley.
Accompanying the exhibition, Turner Contemporary will transform its Clore Learning Centre into a dedicated Drawing Studio for 12 months, extending beyond the exhibition’s run. This year-long programme will demonstrate how drawing can be a pathway to creativity, and self-expression.
In 1968, Bridget Riley represented Great Britain at the 34th Venice Biennale (along with Phillip King), where she was the first living British painter to win the International Prize for Painting. In 1974, Riley was awarded a CBE and in 1999, she was made a Companion of Honour. She received an honorary D.Litt. from Oxford University in 1993 and from Cambridge University in 1995.
Bridget Riley has exhibited internationally and widely since the early 1960s. Her exhibition Point de départ is now showing at the Musée D’Orsay, in Paris. Earlier this year, Tate Britain mounted a display celebrating her work which will be on view until June 2026. Other solo exhibitions include Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio, Art Institute of Chicago which travelled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Morgan Library, New York (all 2023); Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut (2022); a major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh which travelled to the Hayward Gallery, London (2019-2020); Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, Sakura, Japan (2018); The Courtauld Gallery (2015); Christchurch Art Gallery, New Zealand (2017); and Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2008).
Work by Bridget Riley is held in museum and public collections worldwide, including the Arts Council, UK; Tate, UK; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Sheffield Museums Trust, UK; Ulster Museum, Belfast; The Dallas Museum of Art; Dia Art Foundation, New York; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, New Zealand; Kunstmuseum Bern; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
