The exhibition title chosen by Riley comes from one of Monet’s letters to Eugène Boudin, written late in life, thanking Boudin for being the first to teach him ‘to see and understand’.

Surveying Riley’s enduring connection with the natural world and her career-long study of the sensory experience of sight, Learning to See includes works from the late 60s, her most recent canvases, and wall paintings from the last decade. The exhibition also brings together preparatory works on paper showing how the practice of drawing has underpinned her working life.

For over sixty years, Riley has developed a distinctive visual language rooted in colour, form and rhythm, subjects inspired by her experience of living on the Cornish coast as a child. Affirming her observation that nature is not merely landscape but ‘the dynamism of visual forces – an event rather than an appearance’, the exhibition will offer an opportunity to view Riley’s work against the context of the ever-shifting light, skies and tides of Margate.

Riley works closely with the sight lines and approaches afforded by Turner Contemporary’s modernist, light-focussed gallery architecture, and the ways a work may respond to the point from which it is experienced by the viewer. On the installation of a major new Intervals wall painting within the exhibition, Riley notes that the ‘unusual deployment of the galleries gives us the chance to see things differently’.

Learning to See gathers paintings from different periods of Riley’s work, not to trace a linear progression of the artist’s practice, but to explore her ongoing evolution. The recurrence of motifs such as the line, curve, circle and triangle connect work across her career, allowing a dynamic dialogue between past and present. These motifs reveal how Riley continues to re-engage with earlier works, sometimes decades later, transforming them into new paintings. In the 1960s, the artist established the basis of her formal vocabulary with her black-and-white paintings and in 1967, she introduced colour into her work, thus expanding the perceptual range.

Such correspondences can be seen in the selection, which includes Winter Palace (1981, Leeds Museums and Galleries) and Silvered Painting 2 (2023, Private Collection); Arrest 3 (1965, Glasgow Life Museums) and Streak 3 (1980, Private Collection) in which different curves relate to the present Dark Colours series. A new painting Pharaoh (2024) based on Study 1 for ‘Sultan’ painting (1983) similarly extends Riley’s engagement with her Egyptian palette.