Bridget Riley: Learning to See

By Apollo, 14 November 2025


The 94-year-old artist made a name for herself in the 1960s with geometric abstract paintings that came to be labelled Op art, and it’s a vein she continues to mine more than 60 years later – though not always in easily categorisable fashion. Riley’s work is often large in scale: one of her latest paintings, Current: Dark Colours 12 (2025), is nearly three metres wide and is made of hundreds of triangles that all touch one another at the corners; many of the triangles have a curved side, giving the whole painting a playful, disorienting touch. This work joins many others, made between the 1960s and the present day, in a show conceived in collaboration with Riley herself (22 November–4 May 2026). Alongside her adventures in abstraction are figurative works she made early in her career and preparatory drawings that reveal the importance of draughtsmanship to her practice.

Find out more from Turner Contemporary’s website.
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Cataract 1 (1967), Bridget Riley. Private collection. Photo: Anna Arca; courtesy the artist; © the artist 2025, all rights reserved
Streak 3 (1980), Bridget Riley. Private collection. Photo: John Webb; courtesy the artist; © the artist 2025, all rights reserved
Dancing to the Music of Time (2022), Bridget Riley. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Photo: def image; courtesy the artist and National Gallery of Australia; © the artist 2025, all rights reserved