Kettle's Yard Gallery Celebrates Bridget Riley's 80th Birthday

Written by Edward Collinson Thursday, 27 October 2011 00:28

Cambridge, UK.- 2011 sees Bridget Riley celebrating her 80th birthday. It also brings the 50th anniversary of Movement in Squares, the break-through black and white painting that marked her out as one of the world’s leading abstract painters. To celebrate these events, Kettle's Yard Gallery in Cambridge is showing "Bridget Riley: Colour, Stripes, Planes and Curves" through November 20th. For most of her working life colour and our perception of its fleeting nature have been at the heart of her endeavour. This exhibition, organised uniquely for Kettle’s Yard, takes paintings and studies from the last thirty years to trace her progress through four chapters of stripes, planes, curves and stripes again. Despite being abstract, Bridget Riley’s paintings are rooted in a Cornish childhood of looking at nature. ‘My mother ... would always point things out: the colours of shadows, the way water moves, how changes in the shape of a cloud are responsible for different colours in the sea, the dapples and reflections that come up from pools inside caves.’ Art school training in life drawing instilled a sense of structure, since when a continuing study of the art of the past has stimulated and informed her work.

Deeply influenced by the discoveries of Seurat and the Impressionists, Bridget Riley’s approach to colour was radically affected by a visit to Egypt in the winter of 1979-80. There she found a palette of four colours, a red, a yellow, a turquoise and a blue plus black and white, which had endured for thousands of years and these became the basis for a series of vertical stripe paintings exploring their potential for interaction. ‘It was a very sturdy, solid group of colours with infinite flexibility.’ As the series went on so the palette expanded in rhythmic compositions of startling variety. A desire to dig deeper into pictorial space, coupled with her careful study of Paul Cézanne, especially his practice of drawing with colour, led to a new structure – the introduction of planes formed by the junction of intersecting verticals and diagonals – and of colours and contrasts. And then a longing for the return of curves and for work with larger areas of colour brought paintings where flat planes of colour appear to weave in space in compositions of lyrical and exuberant rhythms. Now, using a close harmony of hue and tone spiked by strong contrasts, Bridget Riley has taken up vertical stripes again in her most recent paintings – the Rose Rose series. Despite their rigorous discipline, their subtly modulated planes offer a new plastic sensuality and radiate a tender yet powerful warmth. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with a conversation between Bridget Riley and Michael Harrison, published jointly with Ridinghouse. Bridget Riley was born in 1931. After a childhood in Cornwall and two years at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, she studied at Goldsmiths’ College, London and the Royal College of Art. She came to prominence with her black and white paintings in the early ’60s and gained international recognition in the 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Since then she has exhibited throughout the world, with major retrospectives at the Hayward Gallery in 1971 and 1993 and at Tate Britain in 2003. She co-curated exhibitions of Piet Mondrian at Tate Britain in 1997 and Paul Klee at the Hayward Gallery in 2002. She was appointed Companion of Honour in 1999. For many years she has divided her working life between studios in London, Cornwall and Provence.


Between 1958 and 1973 Kettle's Yard was the home of Jim and Helen Ede. In the 1920s and 30s Jim had been a curator at the Tate Gallery in London. Thanks to his friendships with artists and other like-minded people, over the years he gathered a remarkable collection. At Kettle's Yard Jim carefully positioned these artworks alongside furniture, glass, ceramics and natural objects, with the aim of creating a harmonic whole. His vision was of a place that should not be "an art gallery or museum, nor ... simply a collection of works of art reflecting my taste or the taste of a given period. It is, rather, a continuing way of life from these last fifty years, in which stray objects, stones, glass, pictures, sculpture, in light and in space, have been used to make manifest the underlying stability." Kettle's Yard was originally conceived with students in mind. Jim kept 'open house' every afternoon of term, personally guiding visitors around his home. In 1966 he gave the house and its contents to the University of Cambridge. In 1970, three years before the Edes retired to Edinburgh, the house was extended, and an exhibition gallery added. Today, the house is preserved as the Edes left it, making a very informal space to enjoy the permanent collection and live music. The gallery has longer opening times and displays a programme of visiting exhibitions, principally by 20th century and 21st century artists. A £5,000,000 appeal to help extend and enhance the gallery is under way. As part of raising these funds, it was announced on 29 March 2011 that the Heritage Lottery Fund has granted £2.32 million for these building projects. Kettle's Yard Gallery is a major centre for 20th century and contemporary art. Built in 1970, it was designed by architects Sir Leslie Martin and David Owers. It has since been extended three times, most recently in 1993-94. It presents a changing programme of exhibitions, with a variety of one person and group exhibitions which include: 20th century historical exhibitions which frequently have a bearing on the collection or architecture of the house and exhibitions which explore connections with other disciplines or between works of different periods. The permanent collection is composed of paintings, sculptures and objects collected by Ede. It is largely based on associations and friendships formed when Ede was curator at Tate Gallery, as such it is biased towards works from the British avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century. Notable artists represented in the collection include, William Congdon, Ben Nicholson, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, Constantin Brâncusi and Joan Miró. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.kettlesyard.co.uk

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