EDINBURGH.- A powerful vibrant display of paintings, which spans more than 50 years in the career of the celebrated British artist Bridget Riley, opened at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art this week.

Bridget Riley is one of the most significant and influential artists working today. Born in London in 1931, her experiments with optical movement in painting, which date from the early 1960s, gained her an international reputation. For several years Riley worked exclusively in black and white before introducing colour in the mid-late 1960s. The important dialogue between these two aspects of her work is at the heart of the selection of the paintings in this display.

The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art first exhibited Riley’s work in 1973, in a touring exhibition organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain. The following year, the Gallery acquired the artist’s painting Over, 1966, which features in this new display. Over is one of a series of paintings in which the artist used elementary shapes and black and white paint to produce complex optical sensations of rhythm and energy. Shortly after making Over, Riley introduced grey into her work, and then, in 1967, she began to work in colour. During the succeeding decades, Riley employed a rich array of pigments and forms as she continued her investigations into perception and sensation through several series of paintings in colour.

In 2014, nearly 50 years after she created Over, Riley once again began to make black-and-white paintings. While these more recent paintings do evoke and respond to processes found in the artist’s previous work – for example, in the use of triangular shapes which appear in some of Riley’s earliest paintings – they do not represent a revival of ideas from the 1960s. Indeed, Riley has explained that these late works are, importantly, drawn from her exploration of colour. Whereas the works from the early 1960s were composed to produce vibrant, energetic fluctuations across the canvas, the new works allow us to read the component parts as individual forms as well as together as a whole. As a result, the later black-and-white paintings engender a slower pace of looking and contemplation.

This display at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art marks the first time the two groups of black-and-white paintings have been exhibited together in a public institution in the UK. As well as Over, the display features an important group of paintings lent from a private collections.