Conversation

Bridget Riley is one of Britain's leading abstract painters. Over the past 35 years her approach to painting has developed and evolved, from the celebrated Op Art works of the 1960's to the richly coloured paintings she is producing in the 1990's.

Conversation (1992) belongs to a new body of work inspired by the natural colours and pigments that Bridget Riley experienced on her travels through Egypt and India in the 1980's. A diagonal element has been added to the earlier stripe paintings. Bands of complex colours are arranged vertically in varying depths allowing rhythms to be set up and flow in several different directions at the same time. The bands of colour act diagonally to cut and overlap the verticals, creating a complex illusion of planes beyond the painting's surface, reminiscent of the different layers of sound produced by an orchestra. As with music, Conversation acts in a purely abstract way to evoke sensations we may previously have experienced in a different context.