Bridget Riley at St Mary’s Hospital
Bridget Riley has created a 56m-long mural which takes over the walls in a corridor at St Mary’s Hospital, London.
Source: View Pictures
The acrylic artwork is applied directly to the wall on the 10th floor of the hospital. It joins two others that were completed by Riley on the eighth and ninth floors of the hospital in 1987. The hospital says this latest work was made possible ‘by the generous support of the artist’.
Riley says she designed the new mural to be ‘an undemanding presence’ and also to be able to sit alongside notices, directions and fire extinguishers.
She says, ‘This new hospital commission does not have quite the same objectives as my other wall works – those are composed or drawn for specific sites or walls of a particular dimension.
‘The hospital corridors are different, they embrace the whole space: they aim to lift the spirits and to remind one of life outside the hospital, while in no way interfering with the essential activities of the hospital as it goes about its business.’
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As an interior designer who has always admired Riley’s work, this is a mistake. The extreme horizontality emphasises extrusion, which it is not; emphasises speed, which it is not. The directional emphasis is wrong because speed is not what is required, but rather pause and rest. This is not restful.