Bridget Riley and computer generative art

Bridget Riley was born in 1931; she lives and works in the UK and south of France. She studied art at Goldsmiths' College and the Royal College of Art until 1955.

From 1958 to 1959, while working at an advertising agency, her style was mainly focused on the pointillist technique. It was in 1960 that she embraced her signature style focused on black and white geometric patterns creating a disorienting effect.

Georges Seurat, a french post-Impressionist artist, had a massive influence on Riley's abstract work. The art critic Jonathan Jones even mentioned Bridget Riley forged her optical style by studying Seurat.

From 1961 to 1964, Bridget Riley worked with black and white. Only on rare occasions does she introduce tonal scales of grey. This body of work was presented in 1962 during her first solo show in London at Musgrave's Gallery One.

Since 1961 her paintings have been executed by assistants. Like Sol LeWitt, Bridget Riley created sets of instructions similar to what computer generative artists would do with algorithms.

1967 was a pivot in her career; this is when she first used color in her work with her first "stripe painting." Many contemporary generative artists got very much inspired by this series of works.

Bridget Riley also does large-scale murals; for example, in 2014, she did a permanent mural in London for St Mary's Hospital measuring 56 meters / 184 feet.

Bridget Riley's role as an artist, curator, writer, and philanthropist is a fantastic example of a world-class successful artistic career. She has a major influence on contemporary generative art, and we are all fortunate to stand on the shoulders of such a giant.