Art & Creativity Quote by Bridget Riley

Making paintings after the collapse of a shared “platform” isn’t a tragedy for Bridget Riley; it’s the condition of honest work. Riley came up in postwar Britain, when modernism’s big promises still lingered but their authority was already fraying. By the time Op Art made her famous in the 1960s, painting was being declared dead on schedule, while photography, film, and later conceptual art kept claiming the future. Her line about an “essential platform” names what earlier artists could lean on: agreed-upon standards, a stable story of progress, even a consensus about what a painting is for.

The bite in her phrasing is the self-discipline: “if one does not deceive oneself.” She’s warning against the romantic fallback that pretends certainty still exists - the artist-as-prophet, the market’s assurance that success equals legitimacy, the nostalgic myth that painting can return to innocence. Riley’s art has always been about perception as an event rather than a message, and that informs the subtext here. If you accept uncertainty, you stop trying to force paintings to justify themselves through grand narratives. You can let other “things” come into play: attention, sensation, time, the viewer’s bodily response that Op Art makes impossible to ignore.

It’s also a quiet rebuke to contemporary culture’s demand for instant thesis statements. Riley suggests that painting’s relevance now isn’t guaranteed by ideology or certainty; it’s earned through rigor, and through creating situations where seeing becomes newly complicated.