UNTITLED (FRAGMENT 5)
BRIDGET RILEY, 1965
Walk all the way up to this one and look for the brushstrokes. There aren't any. No canvas either. No paint. Ink, printed on a sheet of clear plastic, with white behind it. That's the whole thing. And the image is basically one move. Black bands curve up, dive in the middle, then curl underneath themselves. Stand still and it shivers anyway. In 1965 Bridget Riley is making paintings that take forever to work out. Tests. Drawings. Tiny corrections. Most of that stuff is just studio business. The part nobody sees. Except Riley starts noticing some of those little side ideas are pretty good on their own. Normally you'd take one and turn it into a painting. She doesn't. She picks seven. Leaves them small. Leaves them unresolved. Her word was "fragments." Basically: don't finish it just because you can. Then she prints them. And because apparently that wasn't enough of an experiment, no paper either. Plexiglass. "We all wanted the new!" she said. Seventy-five copies of each, made at a London screenprint shop. Seven little ideas that were never supposed to become paintings. All seven are hanging in this room. MoMA had two of them. Riley gave them the other five.