Comment by Michael Grove on February 7, 2012 at 14:29

PERCEPTION IS indeed THE MEDIUM

Bridget Riley is about the changes - progressive, sometimes abrupt, sometimes apparently disastrous - that can take place in a given situation.

The situation is presented in the simplest possible terms

            John Russell - Sunday Times - September 1963

One of the most distinctive characteristics of Bridget Riley's art is that it "insists" with such concentration that it changes sensory response into something else.

The experience which Riley offers is closely related to the expression of emotion or, more exactly, to the creation of visual analogues for sharply particularized states of
mind.

The very intensity of the assault which her painting makes on the eye drives it, as it were, past the point at which it is merely a matter of optical effect.

It becomes acute physical sensation, apprehended kinesthetically as mental tension or mental release, anxiety or exhileration, heightened self-awareness or heightened awareness of unfamiliar or even alien states of being.

                                                    Bridget Riley Catalogue introduction - David Thompson
                                                                                            Venice Biennale, June 1968

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