Artist behind Southampton council’s controversial £250K purchase subject of exhibit (From Daily Echo)

Artist behind Southampton council’s controversial £250K purchase subject of exhibit

5:10pm Thursday 2nd September 2010 in

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SHE is the artist on whose “duvet cover” painting council bosses controversially splashed out a quarter of a million to add to Southampton’s overflowing art collection.

Now fans of modern artist Bridget Riley are to get the chance to see more of her work as the city’s art gallery stages a special exhibition devoted to her.

The £250,000 purchase of her Red Movement painting in 2006 attracted fierce criticism, despite art chiefs declaring it a “coup” for Southampton to have work of its calibre on display.

The picture – a series of different coloured shapes and lines – was even likened to a “1970s duvet cover”, and questions were raised about whether so much should have been spent on it when only a fraction of Southampton’s 3,000 paintings, worth at least £130m, are ever seen in public.

Council leader Royston Smith, who was then in opposition, described it at the time as “ a waste of taxpayers’ money”.

At the time of its unveiling, the artist herself admitted to the Daily Echo it doesn’t represent anything.

But she added: “As the col-|ours move through different ||relationships, they articulate different visual situations, which could be compared to a narrative or a play, or some situation in which a series of events take place.”

Red Movement was paid for from bequests and grants – notably £130,000 from the former curator of the Tate Gallery and modern art adviser to the Southampton gallery, Dr David Brown, who also left the city a legacy of 220 works of modern British art when he died in 2002.

The Art Fund, an independent art charity, paid £80,000 with the rest of the cash coming from the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Curator David Craven defended the purchase at the time as being vital for the reputation of the city’s collection.

He said: “Love it or hate it, Red Movement is an important piece of art from a celebrated artist and its acquisition helps to maintain Southampton's reputation as a prominent regional gallery.”

The forthcoming Bridget Riley exhibition at Southampton City Art Gallery, entitled Flashback, will be staged at the art gallery from September 16 to December 5.

The display is on tour from the Southbank Centre, and publicity material says it “tracks her influential career from its sensational beginnings in the early 1960s to the powerful large-scale works of recent years”.

Eight large-scale paintings will be accompanied by 30 works showing her changing methods over the last five decades.