Artist Bridget Riley unveils huge Messengers wall painting

Bridget Riley hopes her huge new work, painted directly on to to a spare white wall at the National Gallery, will help people appreciate the joy of being alive.

The 87-year-old artist, one of Britain’s most important living painters, on Wednesday unveiled a permanent wall painting which will be the first work of art many visitors see after they enter the gallery off Trafalgar Square.

Spanning 10 by 20 metres and consisting of large purple, green and orange discs, the abstract work is called Messengers, a title inspired by a phrase John Constable used when he was referring to clouds in the sky.

Riley said the act of people looking was a central part of her work. “I want to make you, or the viewer, feel alive, to have a kind of joy in feeling alive – I just hope that they give you pleasure.”

The artist and her team have for weeks been up scaffolding and ladders painting the work directly on to the upper walls of the Annenberg Court, the space which connects the cafe and shop to the main galleries.

Riley said she was “very thrilled and very honoured” to have been asked to make the painting at the National Gallery, a place she loves. “I have been an assiduous visitor since childhood and I have the profoundest affection for the gallery. It has been a guiding star for me, its pictures like a compass, sources of instruction and inspiration.”

One of the most influential paintings for her, one she returned to again and again as a student, was Seurat’s luminous Bathers at Asnières, she said.

Riley was invited to make the painting by the National Gallery director Gabriele Finaldi who said he had been delighted by Riley’s proposal. “It took on this big white space with imagination, with respect. It was pure and rigorous, rich and joyous. It was on one hand surface decoration and on the other it immediately related to geometry and perspective, the twin sciences of the Renaissance.”

He said looking at the discs left after-images on your retina, “which seem to pop and dance across the surface of the wall introducing unexpected movement”.

Riley hopes people will see how the shape and colours of the discs change depending on where the viewer is standing and how long they look. “I can see a blue, a pink and a yellow fleetingly in the after-images.”

The title is inspired by Constable and clouds in the sky but the gallery said it might also be seen as an allusion to the numerous angels, harbingers of news, that are in so many National Gallery paintings.