Bridget Riley
Firebird, 1971
Signed, dated and numbered from the edition of 75 plus 15 AP
Chances are, when you hear the words "Bridget Riley", your brain will immediately scream *COLOUR*. A chromatic magician of the highest order, it was once said that no other artist - living or dead- has made us more aware of our own eyes. To stand in front of one of her artworks is to be enveloped in a shimmering haze of radiant tones.
It wasn't always this way.
The 1960s saw Riley focusing on monochromatic compositions. These dazzling images made her a household name and she produced no fewer than 14 editions in black and white during this formative decade. However, in 1967 she began to allow pure colour into her paintings, adopting a framework of vertical stripes as her chosen motif. The colours would interact and create a rhythm that would bring the image alive.
This development took a little longer to cross over to her prints, but "Firebird" is the very first edition she ever made in colour, and as such it occupies a very important place in the history of Op art. No serious collection of Riley's work is complete without it. It relates directly to the painting "Zing 1", made in the same year. Twisting stripes of red, blue and green fluoresce together and summon an extraordinary palette of imagined colours in the unprinted space between. The eye flickers across the surface of the paper the way the little firebird itself might.
The issue of this print coincided with a major retrospective of Riley's career to date. It had toured across Europe before concluding at the Hayward Gallery in London. The edition of 75 was donated to the Hayward to help raise money for its programme. The paper used for this print had a few technical problems and later turned out to be overly acidic, so a lot of "Firebirds" have discoloured quite badly since 1971. Some haven't survived at all. Naturally we've been very fussy and are very pleased with the condition of our copy.
This is where Riley the colourist begins. It's one of the most important prints she ever made, at a pivotal moment in her career. It's begun to fetch over £50,000 at auction, often flying way beyond the upper estimate. Two months ago a copy that was literally covered in dead spiders sold for twice its estimate at a sale in the Cotswolds. If Riley's prints had a hierarchy, this one would be royalty.
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