CategoriesStyles and Movements
Contemporary Op Art
Recent abstract art that uses pattern, line, colour and structure to create shimmering, vibrating or shifting optical effects.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Contemporary Op Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Op Art, short for optical art, peaked in the mid-1960s, when the New York exhibition The Responsive Eye (1965) gathered works designed to act directly on perception. Its roots went back to Victor Vasarely's striped zebras of the 1930s, and its leading figures included Bridget Riley, whose black-and-white canvases seem to ripple, and the Venezuelans Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez, whose lines and colours change as a viewer walks past.
Artists today extend these effects. Patrick Hughes builds reverspectives, three-dimensional paintings whose perspective appears to swing the wrong way as the viewer moves. Caroline Kryzecki draws dense grids of coloured ballpoint lines until overlapping layers produce moiré patterns. John Aslanidis paints concentric circles and bands of colour that pulse like sound waves, and Maureen McQuillan builds up fine lines in layers of resin. Look for afterimages, vibrating edges and surfaces that refuse to sit still.
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