For the past year the department has worked closely with Bridget Riley on a major show for Australasia. It is expected that several major paintings from Australian collections, collected during the 1960s and 70s will be included in this the first major solo show to be shown in Wellington and Sydney in over twenty five years.

The artist has herself selected thirty-five paintings, complemented by a large group of over seventy studies and cartoons.  The selection will include a substantial group of black and white paintings from the 1960s, as well as providing for an in-depth analysis of the evolution of her work through subsequent decades, up to the present day.  A room of works on paper will offer a fascinating insight into the intellectual and formal processes which rigorously underpin her oeuvre.  Works from European collections will be substituted for the Australian loans when the exhibition moves to the newly opened galleries at the Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau, designed by Herzog and de Meuron.  In Sydney and in Aarau, the artist plans to include a large wall-drawing, such as the one she first showed at the Dia Arts Centre in New York in 2000.

A new publication will accompany the exhibition, with texts by Lynne Cooke and the New Zealand art historian Jenny Harper, who was the curator of the exhibition Bridget Riley: An Australian Context (1985) held at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane.

Concurrently with this larger exhibition, the British Council will be touring a Bridget Riley Print Retrospective 1962-2003.  This exhibition was originally initiated as a National Touring Exhibition, organised by the Hayward Gallery for the Arts Council England in 2002.  The Print Retrospective will tour for eighteen months to a number of Eastern European countries including Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Poland, providing audiences within these countries their first opportunity to view Riley’s work first-hand.

Venues:

Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland        September – December 2005

City Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand        20 March – 26 June 2005

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia        14 December 2004 - 6 March 2005