British painter Bridget Riley’s work is a fascinating study of the extremist possibilities of color, line and shape. Hers is a woozy spectral vision, immersive and polarizing in equal measure. “Her paintings don’t merely hang on the wall: they warp and pulsate,” wrote art critic Jonathan Jones. “What was she on when she came up with her dangerous vision?”

Bridget Riley was born in South London in 1931, and studied at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art. “The thing I discovered was the healing power of looking,” she told the Financial Times in a 2014 interview about an exhibition of her stripe paintings. She recounted how her mother would “greet a beautiful day, see it, point it out,” in order to take her mind off of her anxieties. Riley too adopted this approach:...