Riley in Cairo: British Art and Egypt in the 1980s

Abstract

In the early 1980s, Bridget Riley produced a series of paintings distinguished by their use of the same group of colours, said to have been inspired by the vividly preserved painted tombs that she encountered during a visit to Egypt in the winter of 1979–80. Though clearly related to the black-and-white paintings that propelled Riley to international fame in the 1960s, these new works represented a notable change in the artist's methods, combining an intuitive arrangement of colour with a simple compositional motif: the stripe. While determinedly abstract, the imaginative origins of Riley's stripe paintings are registered in many of the titles that they carry: Ka (1980); Ra (1981); Luxor (1982); Winter Palace (1981). This essay reconsiders the making, display and reception of Riley's so-called ‘Egyptian palette’ within a longer history of encounter and exchange between Britain and Egypt, ranging across more than a century of military occupation and resistance, Cold War entrenchment, and neoliberal diplomacy. In doing so, it situates Riley's work between colonial and post-colonial ways of seeing.