Bridget Riley is learning by looking

I once witnessed Bridget Riley standing transfixed before a Henri Matisse painting amid the hubbub of Tate Modern’s blockbuster Matisse/Picasso: a picture of complete concentration and immersion as hundreds of gallery-goers drifted around her.

Riley spends as much time as any artist in front of the work of masters both modern and historical, and this small but excellent show reflects her acute understanding of the art of the past, and the incorporation into her work of lessons learned through all that looking.

She has chosen five works from the National Gallery’s collection to make her point — a trompe l’oeil frieze by Mantegna, Raphael’s luminous Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1507), and three of Georges Seurat’s studies for his masterpiece Bathers at Asnières (1884). Pleasingly, she keeps them largely separate from her own works, so that we can draw comparisons and make associations without the clash of painterly language that can destroy shows where the contemporary meets the historical.

The echoes are clearest in a series of recent paintings featuring curved forms on a vertical and diagonal grid. We see hints of Mantegna’s tableau of figures and his immaculately balanced composition. We see the underlying circular movement and purity of colour that Riley identifies in Raphael. And we see the geometry and tonal contrasts she values in Seurat.

Many more art historical resonances emerge, particularly of Matisse. In Arcadia 1 (2007) and the new painting Blue (La Réserve), Riley’s choice of blue, green, ochre, pinks and terracotta inevitably conjure the sky, earth and bodies of the Frenchman’s Dance paintings, and the bathers of Matisse’s own mentor, Paul Cézanne.

But Riley’s vocabulary is very much her own. These works are active — they shift and move the longer you train your eyes on them, with a constant push and pull between harmony and discord, the separation and unity of forms, and surface and depth. Arcadia 1, made directly on the wall, seems both rigidly structured and in the midst of unravelling.

While these paintings eschew the queasy fizz of Riley’s Sixties output, the latest in her series of wall drawings, made entirely of circles that tumble and bubble along the full height and length of the gallery’s longest wall, offers that customary boggling of mind and eye. It defies our attempts to fix its composition, even making the wall feel less solid.

Riley has gathered much from the past, but she remains one of our own age’s most original artists.

Until May 22, 2011 (020 7747 2885, nationalgallery.org.uk)

Bridget Riley: Paintings and Related Work
National Gallery
Trafalgar Square, WC2N 5DN