Bridget Riley at the Hayward Gallery: then and now

Spanning almost seven decades of work, the exhibition showcased the sensational paintings of one of Britain’s most loved artists.

Almost 50 years earlier the gallery had also been filled with works by Riley, as the venue for her first ever large-scale solo exhibition here in the UK.

We’re lucky enough to have a number of photographs of that first exhibition in our archive, and so with some clever positioning and a bit of interactive technology, we were able to compare Riley’s first show in our Hayward Gallery with her most recent one.

See for yourself by moving the central ‘slider’ left and right on these fascinating interactive ‘then and now’ photos.

The two photographs above, both taken from Hayward Gallery’s front staircase, give an impression of just how little the gallery space has changed in the half century between the two exhibitions. It’s the same story upstairs, too.

Bridget Riley likes her exhibitions to include lots of open space, so that people can identify their own preferred way of looking at her paintings. Journalists who reviewed her 1971 show picked up on this, commenting that the spaciousness of Hayward Gallery encouraged new ways of appreciating her work.

You could see many of the paintings that were included in Riley’s 1971 exhibition in her recent retrospective. Some of them – including her black-and-white painting Climax (1963), on the far left of the 1971 image below – have only moved a few feet from their original spot.

Both exhibitions featured drawings and paintings that Riley made when she was just starting out as an artist. In the far right of this 1971 image, below, you can see a visitor studying Riley’s copy of Georges Seurat’s The Bridge at Courbevoie (1886-87), a key painting for the artist.

Since her 1971 solo exhibition, Riley has taken part in many further shows at Hayward Gallery. These include her 1992 solo show According to Sensation, and the 1985 Hayward Annual, selected by Nigel Greenwood.

Bridget Riley — organised by the National Galleries of Scotland in partnership with Hayward Gallery — was at Hayward Gallery from October 2019 until 26 January 2020.