Bridget Riley is one of the outstanding figures of post-war British art, and is our best-known abstract painter. She studied at Goldsmiths' College and the Royal College of Art, and made her reputation with hard-edged black and white 'Op-Art' abstracts. She began to use colour in the late 1960s, and the 'Egyptian palette' of this work reflects the brilliant colours of Egyptian tomb paintings seen by the painter in 1979. Its title refers to the Iranian province of the same name, which was a traditional centre of the silk trade. Such works provided the starting point of the exploration of depth which preoccupied the artist during the later 1980s and earlier 1990s.