Bridget Riley's work from 1962 to 2015 is on show at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert

Fifty-three years separate the earliest and latest works in the Bridget Riley show at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert. The gallery has drawn on three periods of her career, from 1962 to 2015, and the works are united by her concern with conveying the experience of sight. The selection is on view until the end of November.

Install view, Bridget Riley at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 2026, courtesy the artist.

Riley was born in London in 1931 and studied at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art. She gained international recognition in 1965 through her inclusion in The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1968 she won the International Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale. The root of her engagement with visual experience is nature. In her 1984 essay The Pleasure of Sight she describes the inspiration she derived from looking at the landscape and observing the effects of light and weather during her childhood in Cornwall. Her paintings do not depict the external world, and she instead developed a visual language through the combination of fundamental colours and forms, activating patterns within human perception.

Install view, Bridget Riley at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 2026, courtesy the artist.

The three periods on show mark different stages in that development. She began working in pure abstraction in black and white in 1961 and held to it until 1966, when she began to introduce colours such as red and blue. A trip to Egypt in the winter of 1979 to 1980 changed the colour, and the paintings that followed used a balanced and neutral stripe, later disrupted with a diagonal hatching so the shapes seem to advance forward. From around 1997 until 2010 she returned to the curve she had first used in the 1960s, this time as a way of carrying colour across the canvas in a steadier rhythm.

Install view, Bridget Riley at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 2026, courtesy the artist.

The Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert show is one of several chances to see Riley at the moment. She has recently been shown at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, Turner Contemporary in Margate and Dia Beacon in New York, and there is a free display of her work at Tate Britain, which pairs her most recent paintings with one of her earliest. That display closes on 15 November 2026, which leaves two weeks in which both can be seen in London.

Date: 1 October - 27 November 2026. Location: Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 38 Bury Street, St James's, London SW1Y 6BB. hh-h.com · @hazlitthollandhibbert