Bridget Riley: Painting and Perception

Saturday 18 January 2020, 1pm - 5.30pm

Bridget Riley: Painting and Perception Hayward Gallery’s major Bridget brings together a wide range Riley retrospective, which was of speakers and practitioners developed in close collaboration for a series of talks and panel with the artist herself, and in discussions designed to unpack partnership with National Galleries Bridget Riley’s innovative painting of Scotland. Spanning 70 years of practice and explore the ideas and Riley’s work, the exhibition offers themes that recur throughout this visitors an unparalleled opportunity artist’s formidable body of work. to experience powerful and This event has been programmed engaging works by one of the most in connection with the important artists of our time. Schedule

1pm Introduction from Cliff Lauson 1.10pm Talk: Richard Shiff Richard Shiff discusses the special kind of perception that Bridget Riley’s art provokes. He proposes that Riley’s art represents a distinct kind of ‘composition’, distancing it from the work of previous generations of painters. 2pm Panel Discussion: Colour and Perception In response to Bridget Riley’s ongoing investigation into colour interactions and visual perception, Kassia St Clair, Philip Ball, Liz West and Sophie Oxenbridge contemplate our relationship to colour and the act of looking. 2.45pm Q&A 3pm Break 3.30pm Talk: Éric de Chassey Éric de Chassey explores the apparent paradox that lies at the core of Bridget Riley’s art: in order to solicit personal and subjective responses from her viewers, she creates work in an impersonal and objective manner. 4.20pm Panel Discussion: Curating and Commissioning Lucy Askew, Daniel F. Herrmann and Cliff Lauson share behind-the-scenes insights into the process of developing Bridget Riley exhibitions, and consider the different curatorial approaches to presenting her work. 5.10pm Q&A Biographies

Lucy Askew is Chief Curator, Daniel F. Herrmann is Curator Modern & Contemporary Art at the of Modern and Contemporary National Galleries of Scotland (NGS), Projects at The National Gallery, a position she has held since early London. He led the commission of 2019. She first joined the Galleries Messengers (2019), a new large-scale in 2011 as Senior Curator. Previous wall painting by Bridget Riley in the roles include Curator of ARTIST Annenberg Court at The National ROOMS, working jointly for NGS Gallery. Previous roles include the and Tate, and Assistant Curator Eisler Curator & Head of Curatorial (International Art) at Tate Modern. at Studies at the Whitechapel She sits on the Board of Trustees Gallery, and Curator at the of The Common Guild, Glasgow. National Galleries of Scotland.

Philip Ball is a freelance writer Cliff Lauson is Senior Curator and broadcaster. As a trained chemist at the Hayward Gallery, where he and physicist, he has authored many has curated major exhibitions of books on the interactions of the work by Martin Creed, Ernesto Neto, sciences, the arts, and wider culture, Tracey Emin and Bridget Riley, as well including Bright Earth: The Invention as the critically-acclaimed group of Colour. His latest book is How To exhibitions Light Show (2013) and Grow a Human (2019). Philip is also Space Shifters (2018). He currently a presenter of the BBC Radio 4 series serves on the British Council Science Stories. Collection Acquisitions Advisory Committee, and is a Trustee of Film and Video Umbrella. Éric de Chassey is Director of the French National Institute of Art History (INHA) and Professor Sophie Oxenbridge is Assistant of Modern and Contemporary Curator at the Hayward Gallery. Art History at the École normale Recent exhibitions at the Hayward supérieure in Lyon, France. He has include Bridget Riley (2019); Kader published extensively on the arts Attia (2019); Kate Cooper (2019); and visual culture from the 20th and Yuan Goang-Ming (2018). and 21st centuries. He contributed She is currently developing Reverb: the essay ‘The Trialogical Paintings Sound into Art (upcoming, 2020). Prior of Bridget Riley’ for the catalogue to the Hayward Gallery Sophie was accompanying the exhibition. Assistant Curator at Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art and Curatorial Assistant at Serpentine Galleries. Richard Shiff is the Effi e Liz West is a British artist whose Marie Cain Regents Chair in work encompasses site-specifi c Art at The University of Texas installations, sculpture, and at Austin, where he directs the wall-based artwork. West creates Center for the Study of Modernism. environments that mix luminous His scholarly interests range colour and radiant light, to explore broadly across the fi eld of how sensory phenomena can modern and contemporary art. invoke psychological and physical He has published extensively responses that tap into our on Bridget Riley’s practice. entrenched relationships to colour. West has been commissioned by Kassia St Clair is an author organisations including the Natural and cultural historian. Her fi rst History Museum, National Trust, book, The Secret Lives of Colour and London Design Festival. (2016) was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and a Sunday Times top-ten bestseller. Kassia has appeared on BBC Radio 4, Woman’s Hour, Monocle 24 and CNN. She has written for the Economist, Telegraph, Architectural Digest, TLS and Elle Decoration.

This event has been organised in connection with the exhibition:

Bridget Riley Hayward Gallery 23 October 2019 - 26 January 2020

This exhibition is organised by the National Galleries of Scotland in partnership with the Hayward Gallery.