Opening
(1961)
- Medium
- tempera and pencil on composition board
- Measurements
- 102.6 × 102.7 cm
- Accession Number
- 1791-5
- Department
- International Painting
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest, 1967
© Bridget Riley 2014. All rights reserved, courtesy Karsten Schubert, London
This digital record has been made available on NGV Collection Online through the generous support of Digitisation Champion Ms Carol Grigor through Metal Manufactures Limited - Gallery location
- Contemporary Art gallery
Level 3, NGV International - About this work
-
Between 1961 and 1964 British painter and printmaker Bridget Riley worked only in black and white. She was interested in the energy and vibrations between the two tones and the frisson created when they bordered one another. Opening is the artist’s fourteenth black and white painting during a period in which her work incorporated basic geometric shapes, lines and dots. The diamond shape here appears to hover as it weaves in and out of the repetitive parallel stripes. Riley’s perceptual-optical concerns made her one of the most inventive artists associated with the Op Art movement of the 1960s. The complex sensory experience of her work makes the act of viewing it both a physical and cerebral activity.
- Subjects (general)
- Nonrepresentational Art
- Subjects (specific)
- black-and-white (colours) geometric abstraction lines (artistic concept) lozenges stripes vibration (chromatic)
- Movements
- Op Art