{"id":149806,"date":"2025-11-20T08:31:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T08:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/149806\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T08:31:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T08:31:11","slug":"bridget-riley-at-turner-contemporary-review-art-to-make-your-eyes-hum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/149806\/","title":{"rendered":"Bridget Riley at Turner Contemporary review \u2014 art to make your eyes hum"},"content":{"rendered":"

An angry sea is battering the harbour walls outside but everything is calm in Margate\u2019s Turner Contemporary. Here, Bridget Riley\u2019s endless clashing, undulating stripes, curves and dots are a world of geometric serenity but \u2014 the gallery argues \u2014 this isn\u2019t dull minimalist precision for its own sake. No way, Riley\u2019s work is all about her deep relationship with nature and the sea.<\/p>\n

\"Bridget<\/p>\n

Silvered Painting 2 by Bridget Riley, 2023, at Turner Contemporary, Margate<\/p>\n

BRIDGET RILEY\/PRUDENCE CUMING ASSOCIATES<\/p>\n

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\u2019s about to bulge off the canvas. It\u2019s like Riley has taken the seas of Turner (who loved Margate too) and made them somehow more real and threatening.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Read more art reviews, guides and interviews<\/a><\/p>\n

Because at her most successful Riley reminds you that sight is a physical sensation, it\u2019s not just light hitting your eyes, it\u2019s something you actually feel. It\u2019s 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\u2019t do anything else, you can\u2019t hear or feel or taste or talk or think, it\u2019s like you\u2019re seeing with your whole body.<\/p>\n

\"Dancing<\/p>\n

Dancing to the Music of Time by Bridget Riley, 2022, at Turner Contemporary, Margate<\/p>\n

BRIDGET RILEY\/DEF IMAGE<\/p>\n

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\u2019s no visual hum, no eye melting shock of colour and shape \u2014 they\u2019re just limp. The stripes fare a little better but feel closer to home decor than anything else.<\/p>\n

But the good works do one thing over and over: they make you see in new ways, mess with your eyeballs. They\u2019re brilliant exercises in visual manipulation. And in Margate, with the sea foaming furiously outside, they make you look at the world again, rewired, reconfigured \u2014 now the sea is stripes and curves, colours and forms. Making nature look even more beautiful than it already is isn\u2019t a bad trick for an artist to pull off.
\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606
Turner Contemporary, Margate, Nov 22-May 4, turnercontemporary.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An angry sea is battering the harbour walls outside but everything is calm in Margate\u2019s Turner Contemporary. Here,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":149807,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-149806","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149806\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}