Untitled [Based on Movement in Squares] (Schubert 1)

Movement in Squares, the seminal painting upon which this, the artist's first recorded print, is based, was one of the artist's first forays into abstraction. This profound shift was inspired by a transforming experience in a Venetian piazza in the summer of 1960. Caught in a summer shower, Riley watched as the rain water flooded the square, temporarily dissolving the pattern of the black and white stones in the pavement. As suddenly as it had started, the downpour ceased, the water evaporated, and the clarity of the pattern was once again revealed. This optical illusion, in which a seemingly rigid structure becomes temporarily unstable before returning to its original state, became a defining principle that was to shape her work for many years. In this screenprint the eye is compelled across the chequer-board squares on the left, across the picture plane as they narrow in width, to the visual vortex, where it is swallowed-up, before being released again to the renewed pattern of squares on the right. It is a fine example of Riley's exploration of the dynamics of seeing, and of the emotional polarities associated with it - feelings of tension and release, permanence and inconstancy, claustrophobia and spaciousness, anxiety and calm.