What is Op Art?
Op Art (or Optical Art) is all about repetition and surface. It's about creating the illusion of movement and depth on a 2D surface using repeating patterns of shapes and colour.
Op Art was pioneered by artists like Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely in the 1960's and came to public attention after an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965 called "The Responsive Eye".
On this site you can find out everything about Op Art. You can read about the main artists and see examples of their work, download pictures from the gallery including free Op Art iPhone wallpapers and upload and share your own Op Art artwork. We've recently added an Op Art Shop selling Op Art Posters and Op Art Books
What's new in the gallery - June 2010
We've just added two striking Op Art anti-smoking posters created by the advertising agency JWT (Brazil) for the cancer Hospital A C Camargo in Brazil. Both have the slogan "Cigarettes - just looking at them makes you sick."
Other new additions to the gallery come from a series of Op Art works by the German digital artist Marco Braun. Marco works primarily in Photoshop and uses digital pictures of grids or lines wich he transforms with filters to create his art. Click on the images below to see larger versions of his works. You can see more of Marco's Op Art work on his Flickr stream
Op Art Cigarette
Op Art Ashtray
Op Art 1
Op Art 2
Op Art 3
Op art 4
Op art 5
Op art 6
Op Art Exhibition News - Early Bridget Riley Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery
Bridget Riley is putting on a new show of previously unexhibited portraits from her pre-Op Art student days in a new exhibition revealing how traditional life drawing is at the heart of her Op Art work.
The portraits will be on display at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from May 15 2010 until December 5 2010. On display are 15 works dating from the early to mid-Fifties depicting Riley's family, friends and studio models in media including pencil and conte crayon. Entrance to the exhibition is free.
Bridget Riley's Young Girl
