Bridget Riley, Coloured Greys [2], 1972. Evening & Day Editions London.
Stop spinning in circles or you’ll get dizzy.
Don’t stare. It’s impolite.
If you keep making that face, it’ll get stuck that way.
Bridget Riley, Composition with Circles 4, 2004. Evening & Day Editions London.
Childhood’s simple joys have a way of becoming symptoms the moment adults get involved, and that’s no fun. It’s how a quirk grows into an affect, and, in turn, when the original delight is rediscovered in memory, it can only exist as an unobtainable meeting of time, place, and subject. In other words, most of us can eventually only observe fun through the lens of reason; meaning is retroactive, and the moment itself is lost. Artists of all forms reckon with this antinomy. Exceedingly few manage to never lose that innate facility to begin with, which only highlights how remarkable it is that Yayoi Kusama, now 94, and Bridget Riley, 92, continue to stand out as artists whose works inspire and disorient in equal measure. On offer as part of our 10th anniversary London Evening & Day Editions Sale are several works by both artists which carry with them all the hallmarks of joyfully unadulterated experience, and which we highlight below.
Repetition and Form
Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin 2000 (Yellow), 2000. Evening & Day Editions London.
Executed in 2000, the present work showcases Kusama’s lifelong fascination with the pumpkin and monochromatic polka dots. “Just as Bodhidharma spent ten years facing a stone wall, I spent as much as a month facing a single pumpkin. I regretted even having to take time to sleep,” she notes. The work provides an almost hallucinatory surface, heightened by the surrounding web of geometrical black lines. A remarkable example that is archetypal of Kusama’s pumpkin motif, the work brilliantly encapsulates the artist’s obsessive focus on accumulation, repetition, and the infinite.
Top: Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin 2000 (Red) (detail), 2000. Evening & Day Editions London. Bottom: Bridget Riley, Coloured Greys [1] (detail), 1972. Evening & Day Editions London.
“My desire to create works of pumpkins still continues,” Kusama says. “I have enthusiasm as if I were still a child.” It is precisely in this mode that we can fully understand how Kusama’s reflections on the subject come from a place of joy and constant rediscovery of a crucial, formative image for the artist; one which finds a new audience with each iteration.
Bridget Riley, Untitled, from Rothko Memorial Portfolio, 1973. Evening & Day Editions London.
Similarly, Riley’s geometric abstraction embraces a form of meaning-making that belies its simplicity. Having started her experimentations with color in 1967, the present work dates from the artist’s early stripe period, wherein her harmonic balance of color and shape manage to simultaneously hold the viewer’s attention and challenge their optical steadiness. Riley contributed this work to a portfolio of prints published in 1973 by the Mark Rothko Memorial Trust, a charity run by art writer Bryan Robertson to raise funds for artists working in the UK to travel to the US. The work itself is a process of continuous exchange: precision is rendered through positive and negative space; movement is implied and relies on the observer to create it. In this way, Riley – who has regularly spoken about the ways in which meaning is created – accomplishes a feat of abstraction: in presenting a simple, repeated form, we witness not a particularity, but a peculiarity, and the more time we spend with it, the more it captivates and unfolds, only rather than spilling over with clarity, it instead grows more evasive as we get closer.
Experience and Sensation
L-R: Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin 2000 (Green). Evening & Day Editions London. Yayoi Kusama, A PUMPKIN YOR-A, 2004. Evening & Day Editions London. Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin 2000 (Red), 2000. Evening & Day Editions London.
From Kusama’s signature Infinity Mirror Rooms to the Accumulation installations, perceptual experience guides the artist’s exploration of immersion. This extends remarkably even though her prints, as seen here. The pumpkin acts as almost an inversion of Riley’s peculiarity to assert that the particular contains the universal – Kusama’s pumpkins function as both an allegory and a form of self-portraiture, an embodiment of optimism, serenity, and joy. Each of Kusama’s pumpkins radiate messages of hope, peace, and love to all corners of the world. It should come as no surprise, then, that her pumpkins are now gracing Louis Vuitton bags, and her partnership with the brand includes an option to “Kusama-ify” your phone and carry a pumpkin background wherever you go. Kusama everywhere, all the time, on the very device we use to experience the world.
Bridget Riley, Intervals 3, 2021. Evening & Day Editions London.
For Riley, sensation returns time and again, da capo, in her work. The Intervals series, which the artist has developed and returned to over nearly sixty years, employs a dynamic range of color, shape, and arrangement to capture fleeting experiences and the ephemeral perceptions that arise in those moments. The series title offers musicality – intervals between notes occupy a space like Riley’s white gaps between blocks, similar to how the Coloured Greys undulate in combined forms like sound waves interspersed by silence, or in the stretched Op Art sinews of Untitled. In Riley’s unique brilliance, these prints can be experienced as sheet music for a lost piece; each an interlude in a practice spanning over half a century, all of it spent in service of imbuing transient encounters with a lasting impression and deceptive simplicity.
Bridget Riley, Untitled [La Lune en Rodage - Carlo Belloli], 1965. Evening & Day Editions London.
As it turns out, when you're dizzy, the best thing to do is to stare at something until it all stops spinning. And if you keep making that face, you'll perfect it eventually. Have a little fun and meaning will follow. It's simple joy to take in these works, and it rests in the moment for each of them.
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