Cambridge, UK.- 2011 sees Bridget Riley celebrating her 80th birthday. It also brings the 50th anniversary of Movement in Squares, the break-through black and white painting that marked her out as one of the world’s leading abstract painters. To celebrate these events, Kettle’s Yard Gallery in Cambridge is showing “Bridget Riley: Colour, Stripes, Planes and Curves” through November 20th. For most of her working life colour and our perception of its fleeting nature have been at the heart of her endeavour. This exhibition, organised uniquely for Kettle’s Yard, takes paintings and studies from the last thirty years to trace her progress through four chapters of stripes, planes, curves and stripes again. Despite being abstract, Bridget Riley’s paintings are rooted in a Cornish childhood of looking at nature. ‘My mother … would always point things out: the colours of shadows, the way water moves, how changes in the shape of a cloud are responsible for different colours in the sea, the dapples and reflections that come up from pools inside caves.’ Art school training in life drawing instilled a sense of structure, since when a continuing study of the art of the past has stimulated and informed her work.