Art gallery preview: in pictures

Bridget Riley: Paintings and Related Work | National Gallery; 22 May 2011

Riley’s art has been liked to listening music, but it is equally true to say it is like reading a musical score: we participate actively in the analysis of the underlying formal structures that govern her use of light, colour and movement. Her pictures demand so much of your eye and brain that only an art historian would pause to consider their relationship to paintings by any other artist, living or dead. Not for the first time this year, the National Gallery has staged an exhibition that should really have been a book.