Bridget Riley becomes first woman artist to win prestigious Dutch colour prize

26th July 1979: Bridget Riley, British painter and leading figure in the Op Art movement, standing in front of one of her curving 'line' paintings at her studio. (Getty Images)

British artist Bridget Riley, 81, has become the first woman to receive the prestigious Dutch art award recognising use of colour, the Sikkens Prize.

A lot of Riley's work is monochrome, which might be surprising for the winner of a colour award. Her painstaking studies in geometric pattern (a style branded "op art") were praised by the Sikkens Foundation for their "purity, subtlety and precision"

An exhibition of Riley's work will go on show at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag to celebrate her win.

"I hope people will find things in it to look at," Riley told The Guardian. "It has a variety of relationships, a variety of passages in it. There are things to find in it, I hope, just as there are in a landscape painting."

The Sikkens Foundation said in a statement published on the museum website that Riley "will receive this prestigious colour award for the way in which she has continued to use colour in her work in the past five decades."

It called her "the grand old lady of British art" and praised her "sensational ouvre from which a new generation of artists is drawing inspiration".