Carin Riley’s abstract works on paper and canvas are fluid and ethereal. She creates intricate angles of lines, weavings of varying patterns and densities, some loose and open, others twisted and tightly drawn.
Riley was attracted to weaving as a child. It is this that gives her a starting point for her art. Modulating the various lines, she deftly plays lights and darks against each other.
She pulls them forward, forces them back, thickening and thinning, She prefers to focus on one color at a time. It gives the work structural clarity and intensity. In her treatment of a single color, that color becomes sufficient on its own.
While she remains an abstract artist, Riley has experimented with figuration, and her works are often sensitively poised between the abstract and the representational. They are influenced by her passion for mythology and ancient cultures.
Carin Riley was born in New York City, she attended the School of Visual Arts, New York, in the 1970s and studied painting. Minimalism and Postminimalism were the prevailing styles at the time and her teachers were Robert Ryman, Robert Mangold, Richard Serra, and Brice Marden among others. Richard Artschwager was also a mentor. After SVA, Riley received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1973.
