Riley’s career and success took off at the start of the 1960s. The game changer, as she admits, was her 1961 Movement in Squares. This painting was a ground-breaking moment for the artist, as it marked the start of her journey towards the geometric patterns that define her oeuvre. With its endless dizzying and mesmerising effects, her Movement in Squares set the tone for her future masterpieces.

A second watershed in her career, in 1967 her Stripes series officially introduced colour to Riley’s previously monochromatic black and white works. The stability of the repeated stripe form enabled Riley to explore the visual effects of colour and varying colour combinations in greater depth, expanding her compositions' perceptual and optical possibilities. Distinctive and optically vibrant, the Stripes series is truly iconic.

Bridget Riley's techniques involve the use of geometric shapes, lines, and colours to create visual rhythm in her works. Her signature style often features repetitive patterns that produce optical illusions, causing the viewer's eye to move across the canvas.

Bridget Riley's work has been offered at auction multiple times, with realized prices ranging from 26 USD to 5,783,812 USD, depending on the size and medium of the artwork. Since 1998 the record price for this artist at auction is 5,783,812 USD for Gala, sold at Christie's London in 2022.

Riley's mature style, developed during the 1960s, was influenced by sources like the French Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat. In 2015–6, the Courtauld Gallery, in its exhibition Bridget Riley: Learning from Seurat, made the case for how Seurat's pointillism influenced her towards abstract painting.

Bridget Riley's techniques involve the use of geometric shapes, lines, and colours to create visual rhythm in her works. Her signature style often features repetitive patterns that produce optical illusions, causing the viewer's eye to move across the canvas.

Working exclusively in monochrome until the late 1960s, Riley’s early works integrate optical, scientific effects into the language of painting. Typically featuring repeated geometric shapes, Riley created the effect of movement on two-dimensional surfaces, stimulating the viewer’s eyes into sharper attention as the canvases appear to move and oscillate. Riley’s first works demonstrate her desire to capture the dazzling brilliance of nature in non-figurative abstraction: rendering the sensations and emotions generated when regarding nature in paint, rather than the natural landscapes themselves.

Throughout the 1960s, Riley developed her practice by incorporating grey hues into her works. Yet, it was these exclusively black and white works which initially propelled Riley to international acclaim following the artist’s inaugural solo show at Gallery One in 1962.

Riley credits her fervent interest in colour and form with the work of the Italian Futurists and French Masters such as Henri Matisse and Georges Seurat. Pointillism and Divisionism also underpin Riley’s practice: both modern art movements that rely on the capacity of the eye to regard colours laid side by side in order to achieve a fuller spectrum of colour. Like many artists before Riley, including Sonia Delaunay and Josef Albers, Riley was keen to explore the emotional reactions colours could evoke in the viewer.

The leading light of the Op-Art movement, Riley remains a consistent innovator at the age of 91. In the last 12 months total print sales in the Riley market have totalled £814,041.

Riley’s prints are available in a variety of colours, design compositions, paper sizes, edition sizes and eras, spanning the 1960s to 2020s. They are all independent to her paintings – not reproductions in a small format – making each edition works of art in their own right.

Riley’s prints are also attracting a growing international audience. In 2020, the UK was the largest market for her prints with 81% of sales, while the US had 10% and other countries accounted for 9%. In 2021, the UK’s market dominance decreased to 79%, while the US had grown to 7.5% and other countries to 13.5%.