Victor Vasarely

Vasarely built paintings from grids, geometric forms, and color contrasts that create optical motion. Works such as Vega-Nor from 1969 show the swelling, warped-space effect that became central to Op Art.

Both are major Op Art figures, but Vasarely often used modular geometric systems and color fields, while Bridget Riley is strongly associated with vibrating line and stripe effects. Vasarely was Hungarian-French and worked for decades in France.

The Fondation Vasarely is in Aix-en-Provence, France, and opened in 1976. It was created to present Vasarely's architectural-scale optical work and his idea of art integrated into public space.

Zebra, usually dated to the late 1930s, is often cited as an early Op Art work because it creates form through black-and-white curves. It predates the 1960s Op Art boom by decades.