Homage to Bridget Riley is a generative series that pays tribute to the Op Art pioneer, translating her iconic explorations of perception into the computational medium. The work uses algorithms to create a mesmerizing field of pulsing patterns and visual rhythm, generating a profound sense of depth and movement from simple geometric forms.
In 2024, the series was selected by prominent curator Tina Rivers Ryan for ‘Electric Op’, a major two-venue international museum exhibition. The show traveled from the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in the USA to the Musée d’arts de Nantes in France, placing LIA’s work in direct dialogue with the history of Op Art.
Homage to Bridget Riley: Parts I & II (2018), generative video.
Exhibition at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, USA (2024)
Installation views from the ‘Electric Op’ exhibition, curated by Tina Rivers Ryan.
On the Homage to Bridget Riley
Homage to Bridget Riley,
a two-part generative installation by LIA“For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces, an event rather than an appearance.” Bridget Riley, The Eye’s Mind: Collected Writings 1965-2009
A reduced palette and a formal constraint that lead to exuberant and complex compositions. Works teeming with life and with the joy of life. Mathematically inspired patterns that explore perception and strive for beauty and the sublime. A body of work that is not primarily focused on political comment or on self-expression, but aims at creating tools for exploring how one sees, thinks, and feels, with artworks that are critical tools and instruments for discovery and enlightenment.
This would be an apt description of LIA’s works, but the same words would be equally fitting to Bridget Riley’s, to whom LIA pays homage in this installation.
Riley has long been an influence to LIA. Understandably so, given their common ground. Riley and LIA create mathematically inspired works that are nevertheless not constrained by mathematics, that do not aim at its visualisation but rather transcend mathematics and use it as an instrument to probe the human mind.
Directly referencing the formal style of some of Riley’s most iconic works, LIA creates a diptych of apparently similar, but ultimately quite contrasting, structures. The dialectical balance of white and black elements, straight and curved lines, rotating motion and vertical displacement, creates a mesmerising field of gently moving, vertiginous, pulsing, and harmonic energy that draws and fully engages our gaze.
Text by Miguel Carvalhais
Project Details
Year Created: 2018
Medium: Generative Art, presented as Video Installation
Major Museum Exhibitions
‘Electric Op’, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York, USA (Sep 27, 2024 – Jan 27, 2025)
Curator: Tina Rivers Ryan
Photography: Aaron Penne, @benbarnhardt
‘Electric Op’, Musée d’arts de Nantes, France (Apr 4, 2025 – Aug 31, 2025)
Curator: Tina Rivers Ryan
(Exhibition documentation forthcoming)
