Bridget Riley

Still slightly annoyed I didn't make it to this exhibition, but this book is pretty good. I love reading interviews with Bridget Riley as her processes always seem so meticulous, so thought through, and so filled with curiosity. Her paintings are incredible in a gallery and are never going to pack the same punch in a book, but still play tricks on your eyes and are full of life.

The exhibition at the Hayward Gallery was a really great retrospective with lots of fantastic work spanning decades. Her paintings are miracles. This book is lovely and well produced, and a nice reminder of it. The essays are interesting though some of them do cover similar ground but I always learn something reading about Bridget Riley's work and methods.

Op Art was the first Fine Art movement I ever engaged with, way back in my early to mid teens. I found a book about it in the school library. Its geometrical aesthetic appealed to me very strongly, so much so that I even made a few pencil drawings of my own that fitted in the genre - I might even still have them somewhere. So when a local art gallery held an Op Art retrospective (I think Brits only) I dashed along to see if I still liked that kind of thing. - Yep! Still love it - bought show more every book they stocked about it. This is one of them. It's an exhibition catalogue, with an interview with Bridget Riley and a short biography of her, focusing almost exclusively on her artistic accomplishments. The art is fab, given as much space as the middling sized format (for an art book) allows and carefully reproduced to preserve the colour effects of the original. show less

Early in her artistic career, Riley copied a pointillist painting by Seurat. It had a profound effect on her thinking and work and this book details how, as well as cataloguing works from a small exhibition that brings together the original, Riley's copy and a number of her later works. Fans of Op Art should like this a lot.