Bridget Riley: Paintings and Drawings 1951–71

Bridget Riley was the first contemporary painter to have a full-scale retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. This exhibition of her paintings and drawings was also the second largest retrospective exhibition devoted to a British artist to be held at the Hayward. It was organised by the Arts Council as part of a European tour, which travelled to venues in Hannover, Bern, Dusseldorf, Turin and Prague. 

Alongside the artist’s black and white optical works and her lesser known colour paintings, the exhibition featured a number of Riley’s early drawings and sketches, including a study of a work by Seurat. The critic and curator Bryan Robertson, writing in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition, drew attention to the way that the studies exposed Riley’s working processes and illustrated her development as an artist, leading him to characterise the selection as ‘deliberately vulnerable’.