Cataract 3 1967

Bridget Riley made this cool number, Cataract 3, with paint, sometime in the latter half of the 20th century. Look at those curvy lines, they’re almost vibrating! Riley gets us thinking about seeing as a process, not just something that happens to us. The texture here is smooth, almost machine-like, but the colours shift – from blue to red – creating a subtle depth. It's like looking at a waterfall, or maybe heat rising off the pavement on a summer day. I keep thinking of the way Josef Albers played with colour, but Riley takes it somewhere else. There's a sense of movement, a rhythm that’s both calming and a bit dizzying. It reminds us that art is never fixed, it's always changing.