Jeppe Curth: 0:00

Hi and welcome to the Collector's Edge for Nordic Art Partners. In today's episode, we are diving into the world of Bridget Riley, one of the most influential figures in post-war British art and a pioneer of optical art. Her works have changed the way we experience painting itself. With me in the studio is our art expert Nicolas Robinson, and I'm your host, Jeppe Curth. Let's get started.

Nicholas Robinson: 0:26

It is with Alex Rotta at 400 million. Selling here at Christie's $400 million is the bid, and the piece is sold. We've all heard about it. Sometimes it's front page news. Important works of art are being sold for incredible sums of money. But can you get involved and become a part of the exclusive club yourself? And how do you get started while avoiding buying the wrong things? That's exactly what this podcast is about. This is The Collector's Edge from Nordic Art Partners, a podcast for those of you interested in the mechanics of the art industry, want advice about putting money into art, or simply want to buy something for your walls to beautify your surroundings. Whatever your objectives, it is possible to put money into art wisely, to be considered, thoughtful, and well informed in your choices and actions. Welcome to the Art of Collecting with an eye for curated beauty and practical value.

Jeppe Curth: 1:32

Hi Nick. Good morning. How are you doing? Very well. How are you? I'm good. We're gonna talk about Bridget Riley today. Yes, we are, in between slurps of coffee. True. Please start at the beginning. Who is she and how did she rise to prominence in the 60s?

Nicholas Robinson: 1:50

Sure. Well, I think most people will be quite familiar with Bridget Riley. She's obviously a very well renowned, sort of iconic figure from 20th century painting, 20th century abstraction. Most people will obviously know her, associate her with a movement that came to be known as op art. Very hard-edged, sort of rigidly painted, abstract paintings that ha have a certain kind of dynamic movement or the appearance of a dynamic movement in the compositional elements on the surface. And what what does op art stand for? Op art is an abbreviation for optical art, which was a term coined after her work and a number of other artists of that generation had come to prominence in the 1960s. But she's she's still working today. She's a real sort of elder statesperson of the art world. She's she's 94 years old, having been born in 1931, and live lives between Cornwall and Provence. But when she was born, her father was an army officer, but his career post-army saw him develop a printing business, which they located in Lincolnshire, and the sort of East Midlands walls of Great Britain. But at the beginning of the war, her father had been mobilised, and so Riley and mother and sister moved in with Aunt, her mother's sister, in her cottage in Cornwall. And this was a somewhat formative influence on the young Riley, since her aunt also had artistic inclinations and had studied at Goldsmiths in London. So Riley herself gained admission to goldsmiths on the strength of a copy that she made of a a van a Van Eyck, a Jan van Eyck self-portrait from the 1430s. So she went up to Goldsmith in 1949 and then on to the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. In 1956 her father her father suffered rather a severe car crash, which caused Riley to have to look after him for quite some time during his rehabilitation. And this this this caused somewhat serious mental health issues for Riley, really due to the need to constantly uh care for him. What other biographical information is pertinent? I guess uh this could be pretty germane to understanding her her practice in the late late 1950s until 1962. She worked for the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency. So she was working as an illustrator and she was working part-time, but she was continuing to make her own paintings for herself outside of this uh employment. She also held some art classes for people. But she was very engaged and she was looking at art and around art all this time and has spoken also about a a Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1958 as having had a somewhat significant impact upon her. Thank you.

Jeppe Curth: 5:16

Could we talk a little bit more about this optical art? Could you explain a little bit more about the movement and how she defined in her own terms?

Nicholas Robinson: 5:25

Yes, of course. I mean, her first her first works that seemed to relate to well, I I guess there's another sort of biographical note that's that's relevant. She she developed a relationship with a gentleman called uh Maurice de Someret in 1959. And he he subsequently was a quite an influential writer, art educator, just a a sort of a somewhat prominent person in the arts in in mid-century Britain. And her in her relationship with him, she was looking at and discussing lots of different kinds of work. She was influenced by she was influenced by Pointilism, which we'll get to in a second. She was influenced by the work of Paul Clay, she was influenced by the futurists, so various movements of early 20th century modernity that had started to sort of break down the image on the picture plane. And her first works also bear a kind of post-impressionistic expressionistic feel and and mainly focused on landscape with a loose handling of paint. But in 19 in 1959, she saw a painting called uh the bridge at uh Courtbevoir at the Courthold. Now this was a painting by Georges Surat and was one of the sort of iconic milestones of what we came to call or what came to be known as Pointillism. Now Pointilism was a post-impressionistic movement that came out of Impressionism sort of a decade after the main generation of Impressionists. So during the the during the 1880s, artists like Surat and his sort of protege, Paul Signac, were developing a style which was predominantly focused on hue and light and colour. And the the methodology of quantilism, the technique, consisted of separating colours, the constituent colours of the painting, of the composition, into very small individual dots of colour that arranged, you know, very in very close proximity to each other, and that sort of appear appear to collectively sort of shimmer on the surface, and then when you when you stand back from the painting at a sort of suitable focal length, then these tiny little dots of colour sort of interact optically to form the image and the and the tonal elements of these images. So this movement, Pointillism, which of course came to be key to to Riley. In fact, the very first sort of painting that she made, or what's come to be known as the first painting that she made after her copy of the Bridget Corbeau, was a a landscape of her own invention from 1960 that was called, that is called Pink Landscape. So you can look that up and you can see the influence of Pointalism on this painting that she made. But but the main idea of Pointalism and the main idea that Riley was seeking to replicate or explore was that was that colour is is mixed in the eye rather than on the palette. So it was a sort of a scientific, an optical kind of kind of experience. So so this was not the the painter blending pigments together. The colours of the work or the intended colours were instead formed by the viewer, merging optically in the viewer's perception, mixed in the eye and in the brain, which incidentally is how computer monitors work today, just with, of course, many more tiny dots of colour. So these artistic intentions were sort of underpinned by a belief in the prevailing scientific theories of colour of the late 19th century, designed to achieve the maximum luminosity of that colour. So this was this was you know extremely interesting to Riley, and this forms the kind of bedrock of her own subsequent artistic journey for the last, I don't know, we can say, I guess, 70 years more or less. But in 1961, following sort of a personal and artistic crisis, she was ending her relationship with De Somere, and she began to create her first black and white optical works. Now these were also in a very reductive way designed to explore dynamism of light and in so doing sort of testing the limits of our or the viewer's optical perception. So these these paintings they were influenced by Vasarelli, they were influenced by futurist painting, and they sort of loosely began to conform to an aesthetic that we've already established was to become known as op art. The term was actually coined in 1964, which is, you know, of course, often labels are applied retrospectively when people are starting to sort of understand that sort of a movement or a style of work is taking shape, and then they kind of reflect on that subsequently. So these works that she made, beginning in 60, 61, the earliest like veil or movement in squares, they were they were characterized by a type of geometric abstraction that created optical illusions. They included a sort of a real feel of movement, a sort of a swirl, a sense of confusion. The motifs that she would paint, they they would appear to swirl or rotate or even sort of encroach or recede on the viewer perspectivally. So so this this as an example, this movement in squares from 61, that's generally considered to be her first mature work. And this this consists of a black and white checkerboard grid. Now, as the checkerboard sort of moves towards the center, slightly to the right of centre, in fact, the size of the squares changes, and so it creates an illusion, kind of a rolling effect or a sort of a folded seam down the middle, as if the surface has somehow buckled or bent over in on itself. So this was a very kind of radical departure to cause the kind of picture plane to kind of perform in this way. And most of her works from the first half of the decade from the 1960s, they all explored this highly reductive visual language and are always teasing the eye with these highly graphic compositions in monochrome. And she was to develop this idea through the Blaise series, which consisted of circular motifs where these sort of concentric rows of chevron patterns they have a like an off-center vanishing point, and these would then sort of appear to spin and rotate in both directions, and also appear to sort of move towards or recede from the viewer. In 1963, she made a painting called Fall. Now, this was the first to incorporate a kind of undulating wave motif, which has become one of the key things that I guess people or the layman would generally associate with her work. And this became a recurring strategy for the creation of movement. And these wave paintings are almost as sort of dizzying an artwork as as you could ever see. She would experiment through these years with changing the orientation of the wave, sometimes vertical, sometimes horizontal, but always this sort of high contrast between the black and the white and the tightness of the space between the waves would ensure that the that the surface would sort of oscillate in this very unique way. She described this effect as activating the space between the picture plane and the spectator. So this is the kind of idea that she was exploring in these black and white works in the first half of the 1960s.

Jeppe Curth: 13:57

Yeah, I think there's a transition going from black and white now to the more colour variants in the late 60s, right? And I think that makes sense to to go into that now.

Nicholas Robinson: 14:05

Yeah, actually, yes, that's a good a good way to uh to kind of uh break down the the transitions and the distinctions between between the periods, yes.

Jeppe Curth: 14:14

So I guess is uh sorry, I I guess it's a key evolution. So maybe my question would be what what what drove that shift collar?

Nicholas Robinson: 14:22

Yeah, I I I think that really she's just looking to create increased subtlety and nuance with the visual effects, you know, the more elements that you can introduce to this to this sort of very basic formal language, the more sophisticated and complicated the effects that you're able to elicit as a result. But before she moved into adding colour to the works, she actually started to introduce greys alongside the black and the white. So that was the first transition, and this was the first means of increasing these optical nuances as a series of paintings from uh 1965 called the Arrest paintings. And it wasn't until I think it's 1967, but I'm not entirely sure. But I think from 1967, that's when she started introducing colour uh into the stripes. In the cataract series is a notable series, these sort of undulating parallel lines have some rather subtle colours in the chart series, which actually sort of simplify the composition again by by reverting to just vertical stripes. But this was the first series that was notable for being the first group of works that actually excluded black. And this was instead sort of showing these contrasting relationships of light and dark through the use of red and blue and white. Throughout the 1970s, she varied her output with these colored sort of wave paintings. She she sort of changed the the kind of permutations of the stripe paintings. I mean, these can be sort of divided into various subsets, often kind of based on some travels that she made, which were the source of her inspiration at that time, and and probably became the the kind of key to the palette that she was using. For example, a notable series is called the Egyptian stripe paintings or the Egyptian palette paintings. She travelled there in 1979, and thereafter her stripe paintings bore the colours that she found in the tomb paintings there. So these have a sort of, you know, these sort of dusty ochre colours and very redolent of the kind of palette that you would find in ancient Egyptian interior architecture. But here, the arrangements of colours, instead of being so sort of regimented with the sequence of colours, the sequencing, the arrangements began to appear a bit more randomly, so that the eye would be sort of dancing across the surface, seeking to find the relationships between the tones and the light and the dark elements that she was painting. A key next phase, or the next phase of her work, I should say, occurred during the 1980s. And this this is a very important development because uh a large number of her paintings that are also sort of uppermost in the kind of public understanding of her work consist of these. She she started to introduce diagonals into her work. So the paintings would still have these these these sort of vertical stripes, but cutting across them at an angle she would she would create these sort of parallelogram or kind of rhomboid shapes, so that the surface of the painting, instead of just, you know, instead of the eye sort of reading the works kind of left to right or trying to sort of locate relationships between the colour, these paintings do the same thing, but but instead they have a sort of a zigzag effect on the surface. And the earliest of this type date from the sort of mid to late 1980s. Throughout the 1990s, she continued with this, but this this idea of kind of cutting a swathe across the verticals compositionally was further developed with curved elements. Now, this kind of I guess disrupted the regularity of the grid in in similar ways to the zigzag, but instead enabled a bit more of an organic feeling with the shapes, a bit less sort of rigidly rectilinear. And often these works can feel a little Matisian, in fact, not just in their colour, but also compositionally where they recall his sort of very famous late cutout paperworks. So this is kind of her main sort of developmental arc. I mean, she's been revisiting vertical stripes throughout this time. And then in recent times, she has sort of m made her palette rather reductive, and she's made groups of works called the Interval Works, the Measure for Measure works. And these are these consist of very muted, dissonant colours, often a just a sort of a blushy pinkish colour, a bluish purple, kind of a dusty green, and then sometimes with the addition of a kind of a teal blue. And these colours, you know, they're they're they're a little odd in tandem with each other, but she explores multiple ways of combining these colours.

Jeppe Curth: 19:39

Okay, thank you, Nick. How has her institution recognition and historical career involved over time?

Nicholas Robinson: 19:46

Well, she's been she's been a successful artist for a long time. Establishment in the very early 60s was rather immediate. Her first exhibitions took place, uh her first commercial exhibition took place in 1962 at at a gallery called Gallery One. Now, this was a gallery that was a sort of a quite an experimental pioneering gallery run by a famous sort of poet and art dealer of the London Intelligentsia called Victor Musgrave. So it was a very radical environment which also championed what was then the controversial Bru movement, and he was also the first gallerist to show the work of Eve Klein in London, as well as some other important artists from the uh Fluxus movement. So her first show was there in 62, and she showed there again in 1963, which uh actually was the year that this this gallery closed. But but from but from the outset, her works had garnered somewhat considerable attention and debate, I imagine. It was it was a it was quite a sensation that such uh sort of radical simplicity of composition could could could precipitate such dramatic visual effect and optical movement. You know, up to this point, many of the leading practitioners of of geometric compositions or abstractions of the day, artists like Joseph Albers or Frank Stella or Heinz Mack, you know, these guys were concerned with kind of formal pictorial concerns, as well as, in some cases, sort of the chromatic relationships. But hers were the first geometric abstractions, and this I think cannot be overstated. So hers were the very first that fostered such an incredible experiential phenomenology, which which was so way beyond the more conventional static observation that had been the the sort of erstwhile way that one looked at a painting. So by this time, these the the early mid-60s, her reputation was already made. And she was now showing in important institutional group exhibitions such as the New Generation at Whitechapel in 1964. She was included in painting and sculpture of a decade at the Tate Gallery in 1964 as well. And then in 1965, this is was a really seminal year for Riley because this is the year that she received her first taste of international celebrity. Now, the curator William Seitz included two of her works in what became a groundbreaking show at MoMA in New York. This show was called The Responsive Eye. And one of the works included, which actually I mentioned earlier, was current, and this also was the painting that was featured on the cover, and which, of course, by doing so asserted her very prominent position in this exhibition. So her participation in this, alongside many more established artists such as Maurice Lewis, Agnes Martin, Joseph Albus himself, Ad Reinhardt, was a sensation. And her work, above all of these other artists, came to be considered the most current in that the visual principles that she was exploring and espousing, they really quite literally seemed to vibrate with a with a whole new energy. So she is now a star in 1965, and then in 1966 and 1967, this enabled her, I suppose, to show with a gallery in London called Robert Fraser. Now, this is a gallery that is so cool that Robert Fraser himself was known as Groovy Bob, as the proprietor of what was arguably London's hottest contemporary gallery of this time. Now, Fraser was known for being a prominent socialite. His Mount Street apartment was a sort of famous salon for artists, writers, poets, musicians. Famously, the Rolling Stone song Gimme Shelter was composed there from looking out of the window at a storm. Fraser was also the famous person in alongside Mick Jagger in Richard Hamilton's well-known artwork called Swinging London, where both Fraser and Jagger are shown handcuffed to each other, which was a photograph from a from a sort of a drug bust of that time. So Riley is is is now the the sort of coolest artist in London and among the coolest artists in the world. And her reputation really continues to go from strength to strength. She represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1968, and here she was the very first living British painter to receive the prestigious International Prize for Painting. Her first retrospective took place at the Kunstverein in Hanover, and this covered the period 1961 to 1970. The show took place in 71, subsequently travelled to Bern, to Düsseldorf, to Turin, and even to London, where it was shown at the recently completed Haywood Gallery. She was included in Documenta in 1968. So she's you know she's a leading exponent of this new kind of abstraction, and she is, you know, you know, represented in in every significant sort of exposition of of modern trends, contemporary trends in painting at this time. Now her career subsequently, I suppose you could describe her career as having had a bit of a lull during the 1980s. This was a this was an era that kind of it repudiated the sort of rigidity of geometric abstraction in some ways, and and and the paintings that are most associated with the 1980s are more expressive figurative paintings, important movements in New York and in Germany, especially at this time. But in recent years, there's been a significant revival in her work, and by recent years I mean over the last 20 years or so. There was a major solo presentation at the Serpentine in 1999. This was responsible for kind of precipitating a significant revisiting of her achievements and her influence. There was a retrospective at the Deer Centre for the Arts in New York in 2000, Tate Britain 2003, Museum of Contemporary Arts Sydney 2004, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Vie de Paris in 2008, National Gallery London in 2010, Art Institute of Chicago 2014, Courtauld, 2015, an exhibition that was actually called Learning from Surat, National Galleries of Scotland and the Haywood Again in 2019, in 2020, Yale Centre for British Art, 2022, where it also went to the Hammer Museum in LA and the Morgan Library, and currently also at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. So here you can see since the late 1990s, pretty much every two, three, four, five years, a significant survey exhibition in a very important, internationally recognized institution.

Jeppe Curth: 27:36

Okay, Nick, so let's talk a little bit about her market. She is today represented by one of the biggest galleries in the world, David Swooner. How has this shaped her market, her market visibility, and you know the global demand for her works?

Nicholas Robinson: 27:52

Well, obviously, you know, to have the the sort of backing of of such a significant dealer is going to be helpful. She's shown with David Zwarner since 2014, but she also shows with Max Hetzler. And reputationally, he's you know, he's very, very up there too as a you know, a courageous sort of champion of interesting talents and and just a very big art business generally. So the reach that her her galleries has will enable her work to be connected with you know any and all prominent collectors, both private and institutional, globally. So of course that that helps. And and like I said, since 2014 with Zwerna, you know, that's quite some time to I mean she hasn't showed with him that many occasions. I think there've been two or three exhibitions that they've done in that time, but they've tended to be substantial survey type exhibitions where where the kind of range of her explorations and her achievement is sort of essayed and presented, a little bit like the the the Richter show that that Zwirna has currently in Paris and that we just saw. So this is this is obviously kind of major commercial gallery backing for her, and uh, you know, her her significant historic achievement and reputation is such that you know her works are expensive. But I mean, when we talk about artists here, we we we we're not we're not talking about artists that are you know cheap or expensive, we're too we're not talking about whether they are you know a sort of a a bargain. We're we're talking about what where the value is in the work and whether we believe that the market somehow correctly or appropriately values the importance of the work. You know, we f we we feel, generally speaking, and and the movements in the market bear this out, that you know, if the art historical narrative is compelling enough, then it's often the case that certain kinds of work maybe is. in or out of fashion, but if the substantial achievement in those in the sort of back catalogue is there, so to speak, then invariably the market will will recognize this and catch up. And and and I probably I would say that even though her works can be expensive, we would think think that Riley probably also comes into this category. But I've seen recent paintings just to go back to the sort of primary pricing of her work at £500,000, £750,000, these are for you know one and a half meter paintings. I mean yeah I mean this is a lot of money for a for a painting. But of course when we look at her secondary market I guess this is probably the inevitable place that we want to go to try and understand the the way the market values or prizes her work would you say?

Jeppe Curth: 30:52

Agree, agree.

Nicholas Robinson: 30:54

Okay so so uh I mean that that's the extra opportunities for work so it's also Yeah I mean if one buys a work and and one wishes to at some point sell the work then of course it's really good if one has interesting opportunities to do so. You know we're not going to be disingenuous here and say that we don't buy things because we don't see an opportunity to make money from those things. I mean obviously that's that's part of what we do in a business sense. That's not to say we don't only get involved in things that we love and admire because we wouldn't be interested in things in a business sense if we didn't believe in them first and foremost for their you know for the heft of their inherent sort of aesthetic and cultural value. And and there's no question that Riley's works are more or less as good as it as it gets in that respect. But if we look at her secondary market prices, I've got some stats here which are a little interesting. So her record price at auction is $5.7 million and she's had 15 works at auction sell for more than $2 million. She's had more than 50 works selling at auction for more than $1 million. And the first one million dollar result she achieved was in 2006. So that's very nearly 20 years ago now she's been in that kind of upper echelon of of artists. So so that's that's the first sort of headline I suppose now of the top twenty twenty-five results of of her auction records 15 of them are for early very historic works which is of course no surprise we often tend to see that important seminal works the works that mark and define an artist's breakthrough achievement thing that they became most known for these are the ones that are typically most prized and and by these early historic works in these top 25 results I I mean I mean I'm sort of defining that as up to and including the first coloured wave works up until the mid-1970s. So the first sort of 15 years of her of her working life. But if we if we delve into some of the stats a little bit more specifically you know there've been sufficient results at auction that we're actually able to track the trajectory of her prices her value by looking at the recur uh sales of actual artworks. So we can plot from when an artist an artist work was sold you know in whatever year and then resold and then of course we can you know we can understand how it's appreciated over that time. So as an example the the the very early black and white painting shift from 1963 it sold in 2016 for $1.9 million dollars and it sold in 2020 for $3.5 million. So that's a pretty handsome appreciation over a short period of time. Now another painting Into Place which is a a quite a topical thing to talk about and I'll explain why in a second but into place is is one of the first rhomboid paintings from 1987 this sold at auction in 2017 so less than 10 years ago for $575,000 it sold in 2020 for $1.5 million but it sold in 2024 for $1.25 million dollars. Now does this mean that her paintings became worth a little bit less in that time or is that indicative of a a slight slump in the higher end of the art market? Well of course we can extrapolate from this information as as as much as we want to but I think you know the last time it sold publicly was was was 2024 1.25 million and yet and yet just last month we saw it in London at Freezemasters for $2.4 million. Now it hasn't sold it's still available for that price but the price of that painting it will be at or north of two million dollars just that's just indicative of how you know the market has changed over time for a specific painting. Another similar work from 1987 sold in 2007 Red Place is the name of the work so 19 years ago 18 years ago 564000 and then in 2018 706000 but that would be double today at a very very minimum double gaillard from eighty nine 2007 815 and in 2020 it made two point nine million dollars and to this day that is the most expensive public auction record for one of the diagonal parallelogram paintings. So I could go on there's another one shadow rhythm from 89 2011 540k 2018 2.1 million so you know you can draw your own conclusion but the evidence is is irrefutable we've got one two three four five paintings there that I've cited all of which show more or less the same appreciation trajectory over the last twenty years.

Jeppe Curth: 36:29

Do you know if there's a global market because my my thought is that most of the main market is from the UK right?

Nicholas Robinson: 36:35

Well I don't think that's true. I've seen her we've seen her work sell in New York w into place one of the recent auctions was in Hong Kong I mean she's an internationally renowned artist and and the list of institutions that either own her work or have exhibited her work in a in a retrospective or group show context is also genuinely global. I mean maybe there's a small preponderance of British venues obviously she's a British artist so that's going to be the same for for any artist with their nationality if I also look at the date and we look at the compound annual growth rate for the last 20 years it's almost 10%.

Jeppe Curth: 37:14

Okay. So even though that maybe the last couple of years Uniquo have had a big growth as you just mentioned some of the auction prices it's have been a steadied growth for the last twenty years.

Nicholas Robinson: 37:26

Yeah I mean I'm I'm not surprised like I said there was a you know uh there was a certain I guess dormancy with her work people thinking about it it being sort of uppermost in people's minds during the 80s and and and the 90s but then the Serpentine show in 99 it it really was a sort of a a a jolt back to offer people to really kind of think oh my goodness we really you know we've been missing this we we really need to look at this again and and ever since then you know we've had show after show and auction after auction m most of which has shown nothing but this you know the steady growth that that you're talking about.

Jeppe Curth: 38:07

Do you know how big a percentage is that it's unsold on auction? I've no idea. Less than 10%.

Nicholas Robinson: 38:14

Okay that's that's a high sell through rate. It is yeah yeah I mean she also has a very vibrant print market I mean I have not delved into that that's not really something that that we do but I'm sure that they have proven to be very sort of popular and robust as well.

Jeppe Curth: 38:29

It's a good market for that. Maybe this is a difficult question but if we try to compare Riley a little bit with other postwar British artists as David Hockney in terms of long-term growth potential what what what is your thought there?

Nicholas Robinson: 38:44

Well I mean her work is very different to Hockney's I mean of course in terms of being a a sort of famous and iconic figure reputationally she's perhaps not so different. It's a little bit more niche because the work is is very specific and Hockney's uh is much more accessible it's much more sort of overtly decorative not that that's something that he's ever striven for and I'm not disparaging it with that term but it's much easier to sort of look at and understand and like for a wider array of of of people but I d I I wouldn't necessarily compare or conflate her with British artists I would look at her work in terms of being you know the most influential practitioners of abstraction in the postwar period. I mean the achievement that she that she that she has been responsible for to sort of activate the the picture plane with this incredible dynamic movement is is is you know the the like of which has never been seen before. I mean we can look at other innovations in you know the nature of a painting at this time for example Frank Stella with his shaped canvases you know the record price for a Frank Stella painting is $28 million the record price even for a soup a supremely important artist but I think you can't say that they're they're more important than Stella or more important even than than than Riley it would be Ellsworth Kelly I mean his record price is is $10 million. You look at the record price for somebody I don't even know what it is but the record price for somebody like Robert Ryman I'm sure that's quite a lot more than the record price for a Bridget Riley so I mean I think that that that for sure she deserves to be in the absolute top echelon of artists for you know the sheer kind of innovative quality of the work for the I mean it's funny really her you know we we talk about an artist's work sort of qualitatively I mean she actually has not personally painted one of her paintings since 1961 she very carefully meticulously plots out what the painting is going to consist of there's you know you can buy even even sort of annotated preparatory drawings even at full scale for her works where the where the colours the composition is all very carefully mapped out even with notes as to you know how they be executed the colours the names of the colours etc but she but she she she gives a a sort of a very detailed prescription for what the painting is going to be and then it's it's m actually made executed by studio assistants so for a collector entering the Dryley market what should they focus on is the the early monochrome works colour stripes or the late wall paintings well all of it maybe well I think I think that you know I mean there's not a it's not it's not really that much of an opportunity for most people because to buy any of these paintings you're looking at millions of dollars but what I would say is that you know of course you know if there's a an opportunity to acquire an important sort of historic work then then that's I think something that would be you know would need to be looked at by any any serious collector of her work. The chances of doing so are probably vanishingly small. I mean most of them are in institutions at this point and she's 94 years old I'm sure that there'll be you know significant sort of posthumous reappraisals when the time comes and and of course when there there are no more paintings ever going to be made then the finiteness of that fact will cause the prices to rise again most likely. So getting a 60s painting you know and most most people that would have them would not be interested in selling them because they also would understand that they've got such a you know an important historic monument of mid-century op art, minimalism, geometric abstraction whatever that letting it go would be sort of foolish at this juncture. So I I for me I think that I I look at the the the the price for her peers the artists that I mentioned I I can envisage that the 60s paintings will get into the $10 million sort of bracket. I I I see that as an inevitability. I don't know if it will be two years five years ten years it doesn't matter because you know that's that's the tra the the the direction of travel for the most part.

Jeppe Curth: 43:29

And how much are they now?

Nicholas Robinson: 43:33

You can get them for probably between four and five million dollars but I it's been a while since I've I've seen one there they're they're very hard to come by but the paintings that are not so hard to come by are the are the colourful diagonal parallelogram paintings that she began to make in the 1980s. Into place is one such one that I mentioned for $2.4 million. I've seen works similar to that early 90s paintings for less than two million dollars I think that any Riley painting of that ilk and you're looking at a substantial painting two two almost two and a half meters across you know to get something like that for less than or up to two million dollars would be I think a very good price at this juncture because I think that when the very early historic paintings sort of jump up a notch it's like you know a rising tide makes all boats float upwards of course so the filter down effect will be that these paintings instead of being the two two and a half one and a half million dollar paintings they in turn will become the four, five, six million dollar paintings when the historic ones of course are the $10 million paintings. And these also are historic paintings I mean lest we forget the first of these was made 40 years ago I mean this is very much part of the trajectory of her achievement and it's not like we're looking at sort of decadent late paintings that lack you know lack or have less merit than others. I mean this is an important development in her working life and I I have to say the most sort of sumptuously beautiful groups of paintings that she's made in terms of just the sheer exuberance of the composition and the colour sort of working in in harmonious tandem with each other.

Jeppe Curth: 45:20

Okay so we we actually saw two very beautiful works at a David Schwerner booth at Art Basel Paris a couple of weeks ago do you think that Riley now is primarily an institutional artist or does she still have an active collector base primarily?

Nicholas Robinson: 45:39

She clearly has an active collector base and I think that you know don't forget that Art Basel is a is the preeminent art fair whatever whichever iteration you're speaking about I mean qualitatively the kind of works that you're likely to encounter are somewhat similar across all of the the the venues that they that they that they bring their fair to the fact that significant Riley work was on the you know outside i.e most visible wall of David's Werner's booth there is clearly I mean there's a lot of very important artists that he could have chosen to allocate that very prime real estate to but you know she also has a current exhibition a museum exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris so you know there's a sort of a cultural moment and this and probably lots of the people who are there at the fair they're also whilst they're visiting the fair they're making sure they go and see all of the the the main museum exhibitions that are around town at that time I mean just like we did we're no different we see what we can see while we're there. So of course there's a there's a there's a that painting there's a there was a measure for measure painting on the outside of the booth. There was another work on paper that I didn't see that but that has been reported to have sold from Paris for 2.2 million dollars which I would imagine would be a record for a work on paper by Riley but the painting that you're mentioning was a measure for measure painting and that was priced at 750,000 pounds I think it was pounds I I forget I mean if it's pounds then of course that's more or less a million dollars maybe I'm mistaken but generally speaking that's that's the price level so Nick is Air Britt Riley undervalued today and what do you think the outlook is? Yeah I think so I mean I think that I feel like I've been understanding that and I and I've of course tried to make my case for that make the arguments why I believe that to be the case. You know I don't have a a crystal ball obviously different types or styles of work kind of you know tap into a a certain zeitgeist or consciousness at any given time but culturally her works I feel have always resonated in that way in terms of like really striking a chord of you know a a wider population. I mean when she first made these these works in the 1960s I mean I I would say that you know other than Andy Warhol she probably kind of captured a a mood or a feel almost more than any other artist. You know the di the very dizzying effects of her paintings related very closely to the rise of psychedelia in the 1960s. You know there was a lot of a lot of kind of discussion on the on the effects of LSD for example in terms of changing or enhancing perception if you look at the in fact she became a little disillusioned with institutional exhibitions after her painting Current was on the cover of the MoMA exhibition the responsive eye there was no there were no kind of mechanisms to kind of protect artists copyright or intellect intellectual property in the same way that there are today and this kind of this this kind of graphic wave ended up becoming sort of prevalent everywhere and she felt that she was basically getting ripped off and her sort of proprietary intellectual property was being utilized for all kinds of commercial purposes and merchandise etc you would find her influence in graphic design album covers I mean you know her her her angular sort of hard-edged paintings are are almost I guess inextricably linked almost to the famous fashion designer of the 1960s Mary Quant so you know I think that I think that you you have to acknowledge that there are few artists who have who have created such you know rigorous rigid intellectual exercises. I mean these are exercises in painting they're exercises in optical science they they really kind of push the envelope of what geometric abstraction was doing or was able to do at this time and yet they've also kind of captured the mood of a public with just the sheer exuberance of their visual properties. So so I think that she is undervalued because because her achievement is to me at least really one of the most and of course I'm not the only person who thinks this but but her achievement really is one of the most sort of radical moves of the 20th century to be able to to be able to take a paint to be able to make a painting or to take the sort of nature of painting and then to to cause it to sort of vibrate and move and even appear to be sort of almost trying to slither off the surface I mean I don't think there's been really an artist before or since who's managed to sort of destabilize the image in such a striking and literal way thank you Nick for telling us so passionate about I guess your home country star Riley it's a brand pleasure to listen to you to make it today. It's been really interesting.

Jeppe Curth: 51:00

Anything to add here no in the end no nothing I think that there's no more that I can say about Riley and people probably would not thank me for doing so you did well thank you that was it for this episode of the Collector's Edge if you are looking for expert insights want to make informed decision and would like advice from independent advisors send us an email or maybe just call us you can find all the info on our website nordegartpartners.com thank you for listening and we hope to have you back for another episode bye