Far from being the peripheral art form that some later accounts have presented, Riley’s work had a central place in contemporary cultural debates and is a point of focus at which many strands of art and cultural history come together.
They relate in subtle and unexpected ways to much of the other art of the period – from the legacy of Jackson Pollock to later developments in Postmodernism – whilst also correlating with areas of culture outside art, such as the ‘space race’ and the emerging countercultural movements.