Gillian Ayres, Alan Cristea Gallery, London

Louise Bourgeois, Maria Lassnig, Bridget Riley, Rose Wylie: the woman artist on long slow burn who bursts into late fire is already a truism of 21st-century art practice. Abstract painter Gillian Ayres is high on this list: her show of exuberant new canvases and inventive, experimental woodcuts and monotypes celebrates the 85th birthday of an artist at the very best six decades into her career.

As often with late style, Ayres' old-age compositions are at once magnificently simplified and more gorgeously opulent than ever. She was always a painterly painter, but her approach now is looser, freer and also sharper: instead of the thick impasto or densely woven skeins characterising her earlier work, she introduces crystalline, crisp-edged forms hinting at the natural world - moon, seeds, skies, fruit - and discreetly defined patches of sonorous colour. Many works unfold like friezes, full of dancing contrasts. Night offsets days in the two-metre woodcut "Xanadu" whose warm orange, pink, purple organic shapes are anchored by a central black panel, nature waxes and wanes, flowers thrusting erect into life, leaves wilting and falling, in the abstracted landscape "Tremenheere".

Ayres says her palette has been heightened by recent trips to Egypt and Yemen. "Pythia" is Mediterranean blue, with starfish and shells; "Suns of Seven Circles Shine" suggests pomegranates and water melons, recalling luxuriant late Matisse. "Under the Mile off Moon" is a harmonious night picture; blue and lilac lightly balance in "The Seesaw Sea". Everywhere, Ayres' swooping gliding biomorphic forms, with their mellifluous titles - "Laughter's Silvered Wings", "The Mild Harping of the Breeze", "Mazy Sands all Water-Wattled" - evoke the rhythms of lyric poetry; they are, as Ayres says of the work of Miro, the modernist who is her greatest influence, "an internal vision of eternity".

alancristea.com, 020 7439 1866, Monday to May 30

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