Word: riley
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Unstable Focus. Precision is its keynote; but then, Riley is an epitome of that, both in her art and in her rigorous, gently ironic address to life. A slender woman of 44, she lives alone, dividing her time between a house in London's Holland Park, a studio in Cornwall ("Cornwall is full of artists and I manage to avoid nearly all of them," she says with glee), and a second studio in the Vaucluse district of Southern France, not far from the ruins of the Marquis de Sade's castle at La Coste. A second-generation Londoner...
...surprisingly, then, Riley grew up untroubled by the ideological flak that now surrounds women's art in America, and rejects the idea of a "feminist" art. "Women's liberation," she declared a few years ago, "when applied to artists, seems to me to be a naive concept...
...decade ago, when she first showed her work in the U.S., Riley's paintings were almost synonymous with visual assault. Black elliptical dots on a white ground, arranged in a grid but turning fractionally to set up an irritating instability of focus; parallel stripes whose wavy motion produced something akin to seasickness. Ever since her art-student days in London, Riley had been fascinated with patterns based on repeated units: the dots in Seurat's paintings, the balance of delicate strains between Mondrian's squares...
...surface with water splashes, broke up the stone pattern, returning it briefly to chaos and instability. Could this breakup not be given an equivalent as painting? It could; and that sense of disturbed equilibrium within what looks like a rigid serial structure was to be the essential "subject" of Riley's work from then...
Strong Illusion. Riley's paintings, especially the recent ones with their finely tuned ribbons of color, suffer in reproduction: full scale-up to 8 ft. wide-is needed for their effect, which is to deny one's point of focus. You cannot stare at any one point on a Riley for long. It slides away and is lost in the shimmer. A painting like Shih-Li, 1975, sets up an undulation of space that one feels as a physical pressure. The illusion is so strong that no act of will...