30 October 2012 Last updated at 08:51 ET

Bridget Riley receives Dutch art prize

Bridget Riley receiving the Sikkens Prize in The Hague on Sunday

Bridget Riley (left) received the Sikkens Prize in The Hague on Sunday

Bridget Riley, Blaze 4, 1963. © 2012 Bridget Riley. Courtesy Karsten Schubert, London

Riley's 1963 work Blaze 4 is among those on display at the Gemeentemuseum

Bridget Riley, Tremor, 1962. © 2012 Bridget Riley. Courtesy Karsten Schubert, London

Tremor, from 1962, is another example of Riley's use of geometrical shapes

Bridget Riley, Two Yellows, Composition with Circles 4, 2011. © 2012 Bridget Riley. Courtesy Karsten Schubert, London

Riley has made a series of "compositions with circles" like this one

Composition with Circles 9 at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague

The latest is a mural that forms part of the Sikkens Prize exhibition

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

The 81-year-old's work is renowned for its abstract geometrical shapes and for what the Sikkens Foundation called its "purity, subtlety and precision".

To mark the prize, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague is hosting an exhibition of her art that will run until June.

"I hope people will find things in it to look at," Riley told The Guardian.

According to the Sikkens Foundation, Riley's use of colour has led to "a sensational oeuvre from which a new generation of artists is drawing inspiration".

The Gemeentemuseum exhibition includes a new 20 metre (65 foot) wall mural, painted by assistants, entitled Composition with Circles 9.

"One of the difficulties that many people seem to have with my work is what they complain of as dazzling," Riley told the BBC in 2010, the year the National Gallery in London presented a major exhibition of her work.

"What I was interested in was visual energy and the dynamics of how you could build up a situation that produced a sensation."