Chromatically arresting and visually alluring, Red Return embodies Bridget Riley’s radical investigations into the optical potential of colour and the complexities of illusion and perception. Hypnotically evading perspectival resolution, the uncompromising rectangular canvas of the present work is articulated by alternating vertical stripes of crimson, peach, blue and green, which, when viewed from afar, create a dazzling visual experience that extends beyond the picture plane. The reaction of one colour juxtaposed against another engenders a wavering and rhythmic pulsation, an optical illusion that has anointed Riley as the undisputed leader of the Op art movement. As art historian David Thompson wrote of Riley’s work during the Venice Biennale in 1968, “The impact of a painting by Bridget Riley is startlingly sudden and complete. It is not to any subtlety or delicacy of effect that you react, although the effect is achieved by means which are subtle and delicate in the extreme. There is no gradual revelation of meaning, for there is nothing hidden to be gradually revealed. The work’s power is felt instantly and has the unexpected capacity of remaining constant for as long as you look at the painting, and of repeating itself identically with each new viewing. You are assaulted by a visual experience which is so compact and clear cut that you are left no choice but to accept it (one had almost said, to submit to it) on the artist’s own terms” (David Thompson, ‘Bridget Riley at the Venice Biennale’, in Exh. Cat., London, Hayward Gallery (and travelling), Bridget Riley, 2019-2020, p. 79). Executed in 2011 and building upon Riley’s ground-breaking visual investigations of the 1960s, Red Return is an intensely evocative painting rooted in memory and suffused with sheer kaleidoscopic sensorial affect.

On the surface of Red Return, the viewer detects echoes, repetitions and inversions, yet any search for cogent patternation is thwarted. The eye is unable to settle, our vision constantly moving to traverse the linear geometry of the composition. Riley has described the complex methodology of her geometric abstraction: "I do not select single colours but rather pairs, triads or groups of colour which taken together act as generators of what can be seen through or via the painting. By which I mean that the colours are organised on the canvas so that the eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. Vision can be arrested, tripped up or pulled back in order to float free again" (Bridget Riley, 'The Pleasures of Sight', in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Britain, Bridget Riley, 2003, p. 213). In the winter of 1979-80, Riley travelled to Egypt where she visited the Nile Valley and the Pharaoh tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Inspired by the art which adorned ancient burial sites, she was especially drawn to the symbolic use of six hues – red, blue, yellow, green, black and white – which represented aspects of Egyptian life. Red Return is an extension of the artist’s ‘Egyptian Paintings’ of the 1980s, in which she harnessed a range of intense hues within a formal linear arrangement, compositions fundamentally inspired by her travels. In the present work, Riley engenders a dialogue between the formal structure of the stripes and notions of weight, density, brilliance and opacity.

Riley studied the work of the post-impressionists as a student at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art in London, particularly that of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. While rejecting such artists’ meticulous pointillist technique, she instead concentrated on their systematic distillation of colour and their balanced use of complementary hues to delineate light, shade, depth and form. Red Return reflects this exploration of colour, whilst also incorporating the structural emphasis of her early black and white geometric paintings. While drawing upon a range of art historical sources, from post-impressionism and abstract expressionism to the formal ‘plastic’ concerns of artists such as Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian, Riley has produced a visually compelling, technically adroit, and theoretically enlightened oeuvre of pure optical sensation. A work of chromatic complexity and vibrant beauty, Red Return illuminates an entirely ground-breaking aesthetic language.