AT SIXTY, Bridget Riley is one of the select minority of British artists whose reputations have survived from the 1960s and early 1970s. And unlike Hockney or Hodgkin or Caulfield, all of whom more or less emerged out of Pop, she has survived as an abstractionist, if the term will fit.
At that time, she was widely regarded as England's entry in the international Op and Kinetic stakes - a field largely dominated by Paris based artists and Latin Americans.
Riley punched out a style, hard but skillfully modulated, which caught the eye and tightly held it. Her kinetic "ripples" and nervous, shifting effects probably owed a good deal to Vasarely and others but she made them her own and the overall character of her work was certainly very different.
In those days she relied heavily on permutations and combinations of black and white and grey but as her Dublin exhibition shows, sh9 has since gone far as a colourist.
There is still the old optical pulse beating but these works - large paintings, gouaches, prints - belong more to international abstraction than to Op and Kinetic art.
Some are vertical "stripe" pictures, while others rely on the nervous energy generated by the clash or interaction of upright and diagonal bands of colour. These are selected with great skill and flair, so that the underlying geometry never becomes too obvious and there are occasional "gaps" like missing a bar in a musical score.
Warm and cool tones are contrasted, surfaces come and recede, "pillars" and bands of colour continually shift their stance and display new relationships to one another.
Riley is an excellent technician and while her ideas do tend a little towards geometric and chromatic formulae, she varies them with great resource and unfailing flair. The brilliance, energy and sheer presence of these works, large or small, almost hector you into attention and domineer over adjacent space.
Yet, somehow, I cannot quite view her as a major original or innovator. The style is, ultimately, a composite one - a blend of Op art, 1960s candy stripes, hard edge abstraction and the kind of thing which was done 30 years ago by a variety of painters from William Gear to the followers of Albers.
That said, nobody will deny that she has put her own imperious stamp on it all.
