Bridget Riley — Arcadia For Sale

Bridget Riley's Arcadia is a group of screenprints made between 2010 and 2013, developed in close relationship with a series of wall paintings of the same name. The prints comprise Arcadia 3 (2010) and Arcadia 4 through Arcadia 7 (2013), each published in a signed and numbered edition of 75.

Arcadia belongs to a small group of Riley print projects — alongside Composition with Circles (1998–2011) and After Rajasthan (2013) — that closely reproduce the preparatory designs made for a related wall painting, rather than translating an existing canvas into a new composition devised specifically for print. This working method distinguishes Arcadia from much of Riley's earlier print output, where the print sheet typically served as an independent site for compositional experimentation.

The series marks a distinct chapter within Riley's decades-long investigation of colour, rhythm and optical perception. Where her earlier stripe and lozenge paintings of the 1960s and 70s were built on sharply defined geometric intervals, the curved forms and shifting colour relationships of Arcadia reflect a later, more fluid phase of her practice, in which the eye is guided across the surface by gliding bands of subtly modulated hue rather than hard-edged repetition.

Arcadia is catalogued in Bridget Riley: The Complete Prints 1962–2020, published by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation with Thames & Hudson, using the BRS numbering system that superseded the earlier catalogue compiled by Karsten Schubert. The series has been exhibited alongside its related wall paintings and canvas works, allowing viewers to trace directly how a single compositional idea moved between wall, canvas and print in the final decades of Riley's career.