Look and learn

Bridget Riley turns 80 this year, a fact easy to forget when looking at the surging energy and contemporaneity of her pictures. She is a remarkable artist who, although imposing severe formal restraints on her work, manages continually to surprise us with the richness of her invention. Perhaps it is because of the self-limitations she endures that her imagination is compelled to delve so deeply in the narrow field she has made her own. And its very modernity is an aspect of the way her vision is directly and inspirationally linked to the art of the past. The free display in the Sunley Room at the NG, sponsored by Bloomberg, demonstrates this very effectively.

The exhibition begins with Riley’s own work in company with Old Masters. In the vestibule area Raphael’s ‘St Catherine of Alexandria’ hangs with Mantegna’s ‘Introduction of the Cult of Cybele at Rome’. In this context, the Raphael is about two things: the beguiling serpentine line of the Saint’s posture and the blue and yellow colour scheme; the Mantegna is a grisaille frieze of interlocking pattern in a shallow space emulating sculpture, what Riley calls ‘the extraordinarily protracted horizontals and verticals of his format’.