Riley Large Fragment

In *Riley Large Fragment*, Bridget Riley distils her signature Op Art language into a commanding, close-cropped field of optical sensation. Using meticulously calibrated intervals of line and colour, Riley activates the viewer’s perception—producing vibration, movement, and shifting spatial depth across a seemingly flat surface.

The “fragment” format heightens this intensity, presenting the composition as an excerpt from a larger visual continuum, where structure and sensation are held in dynamic tension. Rooted in post-war abstraction yet continually contemporary, Riley’s practice links modernist rigour with embodied experience, anticipating today’s conversations around attention, visual culture, and the phenomenology of seeing.

This work exemplifies Riley’s enduring influence on contemporary painting and kinetic perception.

Bridget Louise Riley CH CBE (born 24 April 1931) is an English painter known for her singular op art paintings. She lives and works in London, Cornwall and the Vaucluse in France.

Riley was born at Norwood, London, the daughter of a businessman. Her childhood was spent in Cornwall and Lincolnshire. She studied at Goldsmiths’ College from 1949 to 1952, and at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. She began painting figure subjects in a semi- impressionist manner, then changed to pointillism around 1958, mainly producing landscapes . In 1960 she evolved a style in which she explored the d…