An angry sea is battering the harbour walls outside but everything is calm in Margate’s Turner Contemporary. Here, Bridget Riley’s endless clashing, undulating stripes, curves and dots are a world of geometric serenity but — the gallery argues — this isn’t dull minimalist precision for its own sake. No way, Riley’s work is all about her deep relationship with nature and the sea.
Silvered Painting 2 by Bridget Riley, 2023, at Turner Contemporary, Margate
BRIDGET RILEY/PRUDENCE CUMING ASSOCIATES
Since the 1960s Riley has been pushing the visual envelope as far as it would go, experimenting with geometricism to leave your eyes bamboozled and your brain fried. But the sea, and nature more generally, has always been there, inspired by a childhood on the Cornish coast. You can almost see it in the layers of teal, yellow and mauve in the striped works, like all the colours of the sea have been separated out and catalogued. You can just about see it in the interaction of straight and bent lines in the triangle works, like gentle waves lapping at the shore. And you can really see it in all the curving, wobbly paintings, which loom over you like big washes of marine turbulence. A 1965 wobbler in black, white and grey is stunning and disorientating, a 1980 one in green, blue and red looks like it’s about to bulge off the canvas. It’s like Riley has taken the seas of Turner (who loved Margate too) and made them somehow more real and threatening.
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Because at her most successful Riley reminds you that sight is a physical sensation, it’s not just light hitting your eyes, it’s something you actually feel. It’s such a trip getting so close to one of these that your eyes start humming and vibrating. When you look at a good Riley, you can’t do anything else, you can’t hear or feel or taste or talk or think, it’s like you’re seeing with your whole body.
Dancing to the Music of Time by Bridget Riley, 2022, at Turner Contemporary, Margate
BRIDGET RILEY/DEF IMAGE
The wall paintings here are Riley at her worst, though. The dots, even the giant one arranged like a pixelated wave in the final gallery, are lifeless; there’s no visual hum, no eye melting shock of colour and shape — they’re just limp. The stripes fare a little better but feel closer to home decor than anything else.
But the good works do one thing over and over: they make you see in new ways, mess with your eyeballs. They’re brilliant exercises in visual manipulation. And in Margate, with the sea foaming furiously outside, they make you look at the world again, rewired, reconfigured — now the sea is stripes and curves, colours and forms. Making nature look even more beautiful than it already is isn’t a bad trick for an artist to pull off.
★★★★☆
Turner Contemporary, Margate, Nov 22-May 4, turnercontemporary.org