Bridget Riley, Hayward Gallery

The entrance to the exhibition brings you into the largest room and directly on your left is a large mural piece called Composition with Circles 4. I read that these types of wall drawings are fairly recent in her career, starting in the late 1990s. The piece takes up your entire field of vision and drags your eye around almost against your will, not allowing it to settle. The plain black line on the bright white wall with the perfect neatness makes a sharp image and little bursts of energy where the circles intersect. 

Next to this is a small spiral wall that creates a little enclosure that you queue to enter. The inside walls have a black and white pattern on them designed for this installation and the curved wall that surrounds you does away with edges and so you are completely immersed, I really like how this has been done, the image itself is exciting, building up from small beginnings into a dramatic central event, the installation massively adding to the experience and creating an interesting discussion about the canvas and how sculptural a painting can be. 

Up the ramp you enter a few rooms with brightly coloured, medium sized pieces, lots of stripes and lines of glowing colours that fight with each other like chemical reactions, creating a buzzing and blurring image. 

Upstairs we witness the show pieces, the huge and attractive works of colour and alternating patterns. These pieces look as if they have been constructed like jigsaw puzzles or wood joints, pieces of colour slotting perfectly into others creating a running image and movement. They are satisfying and undeniably pretty, but I can't help but feel that they are a little empty, they don't seem to have emotion or tension, just cold precision and calculated attractiveness. 

A room tucked around the corner upstairs showing Riley's prototype pieces and early figurative work was the surprising highlight of the exhibition, and this wasn't just my opinion as I overheard what other people were saying whilst walking around. The prototypes were much smaller than the pieces they turned into, and she used them to work out how to construct her paintings, later showing them to her technicians so they could assemble the finished pieces. They had scrawled numbers and figures, measurements and scribbles, with paint spilling over lines and lots of rough edges. It was satisfying to see the real and raw basis of the perfect and organised paintings we had seen previously. They felt like they had a little more character than the finished pieces, a little more human, easier to relate to than the almost digital accuracy of the finished works, enjoying these works felt like rooting for the underdog. 

The room also had her early figurative works that she experimented with before she settled on the practice she would go on to develop for the rest of her career. These were also a nice surprise, I thought they were very strong paintings, beautiful atmosphere and mark-making. It was interesting that she would start off with such a sensibility to the touch of the surface and variation in brushwork, then later to abandon that completely and pursue only composition and hard edged need blocks of colour. There was information included in that section about her obsession with Seurat, and how she spent a lot of time working from and recreating his works. 

Going back down the stairs took us into the last room, which if you had entered through a different entrance to the one I did, would have also been the first room. This, I felt, was a clever bit of curation as the last room covered her popular monochrome, optical-illusion-type works, which took up a large portion of the early stage of her career, but is also an area of research she has returned to more recently, which brought us back around, creating a loop, and leaving us with the impression of an artist that is constantly experimenting, but always bringing it back to the core interest of her subject. Standing in this room I saw a child standing in front of a painting, feet planted still, but swaying her head back and forward, enhancing the weird movement in the work, experiencing the dizzying and de-stabilizing nature of Riley's undulating and pulsating visual fields. I decided to join the child, copying her, and making myself dizzy in front of a piece. A suitable ending to the show, which was fun, unpretentious and almost practical in its mathematical attention to accuracy.