Op art cartoon.
Bridget Riley cartoon
Cartoon about Bridget Riley and Op Art
Cartoon showing an art gallery displaying a work of op art by Bridget Riley.
The work is a checker board effect that seems to curve into the background in places, giving a disorientating effect.
The humour in the cartoon lies in the fat that the observers of the artwork are chess pieces who are standing on a floor that’s in the form of a chess board. To the chess pieces the checkerboard effect in the artwork is not simply an optical effect, it is the nature of the very ground beneath them – so the effect of the checkerboard folding backwards is a profoundly disturbing vision.
Bridget Riley is best known for her art composed of black and white stripes, curves and other forms that create jarring, vertigo inducing, dizzy-making optical effects that it’s hard to focus on. If you stand in front of a Bridget Riley painting the image sometimes seems to lose all solidity and becomes a shimmering non-corporeal apparition floating in space (because your eyes can’t fix it to focus on, due to the competing close-packed contrasting lines).
The name ‘Op Art’ refers to optical art and also to Pop Art. Both art styles were in fashion in the 1960s.
