Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person: The Early Years
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person: The Early Years Details
Review Riley’s work, which at first appears to be a collection of simple patterns, rewards sustained, careful looking; her work’s genius lies in the way her compositions gradually reveal a vital, dynamic interplay of shape and color. Yet Riley’s considerations reach far beyond the tricks and treats of optical games, urging viewers to rethink the way they see. (Alina Cohen Arsty)Paul Moorhouse’s well-researched, lucid new biography, Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person (Ridinghouse, 2019) may help reveal to a broad audience the full scope and richness of her unusual, distinctive oeuvre. (Edward Gomez Hyperallergic)The first biography of Bridget Riley... addresses the tantalizing question: How did success arrive so suddenly for the young artist? (Artspace)[Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person] explores her journey from British wartime beginnings to her rise as darling of the New York art world―and one of the most famous proponents of op art in the world. (Emily Gosling Elephant)[A Very Very Person] is an entertaining and informative text that adds greatly to our understanding of a very prominent and still highly intriguing British artist. (Hyperallergic)In “Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person―The Early Years,” Paul Moorhouse, a former senior curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London, doesn’t attempt a full-scale biography but instead homes in on the period between the artist’s childhood and her earliest success, and makes a surprising but compelling case for the influence of landscape on Ms. Riley’s distinctive style. (Ann Landi Wall Street Journal)An exceptionally informative and deftly crafted biography of an impressive woman and her equally impressive artistic accomplishments, "Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person: The Early Years" features a center section of illustrations and is an extraordinary and engaging read from beginning to end. (Julie Summers Midwest Book Review)As Paul Moorhouse shows in this thorough and sensitive first biography, which concentrates on her early years up to the age of thirty-four, it was only after many false starts, bracing shocks and firm decisions that Riley found her way as an abstract painter in the early 1960s with her eye-dazzling lines, squares, curves, ovals, circles, stripes and zigzags in ultra-hard-edged black-and-white. (Jerome Boyd Maunsell Times Literary Supplement) Read more
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