Bridget Riley at Turner Contemporary

Bridget Riley’s new solo exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate offers a landmark survey of one of Britain’s most influential painters, mapping her exploration of colour, rhythm and perception from early black‑and‑white works to expansive colour canvases and works on paper. The show highlights how Riley transforms the act of looking into an active, almost physical experience, as lines, curves and chromatic sequences appear to vibrate and shift before the viewer’s eyes.​

Bringing together key paintings and studies from several decades, the exhibition follows Riley’s trajectory from stark monochrome compositions to increasingly complex and luminous colour structures. Installed within Turner Contemporary’s light‑filled galleries overlooking the North Sea, the works are presented in close dialogue with the architecture and changing natural light, underscoring the artist’s long‑standing interest in how environment shapes visual experience.​

For over sixty years, Riley has developed a distinctive visual language rooted in colour, form and rhythm, subjects inspired by her experience of living on the Cornish coast as a child. Affirming her observation that nature is not merely landscape but ‘the dynamism of visual forces – an event rather than an appearance’, the exhibition will offer an opportunity to view Riley’s work against the context of the ever-shifting light, skies and tides of Margate.

Riley works closely with the sight lines and approaches afforded by Turner Contemporary’s modernist, light-focussed gallery architecture, and the ways a work may respond to the point from which it is experienced by the viewer. On the installation of a major new Intervals wall painting within the exhibition, Riley notes that the ‘unusual deployment of the galleries gives us the chance to see things differently’.