It's not easy being associated forever with a single moment in time. Consider Bridget Riley. When the British artist's mind-bending black-and-white paintings were exhibited in New York in 1965, the fashion world seized on her style and sprayed deformed checkerboard patterns all over ties, dresses and lamp shades. It was hip to be Op, as Riley's approach was called, but she complained her work had been "vulgarized in the rag trade." Another artist might have abandoned the style, but Riley never veered from her path and soon transcended the merely trendy. Today, at 72, she is one of the U.K.'s most celebrated artists, respected for a life spent pursuing her own singular vision.

The first-ever overview of her 40-year career at Tate Britain (which runs until Sept. 28) shows how she rose above the Op Art fad. Monochrome mutates into color, and simple dots and triangles morph into ripples and barley-sugar twists, always following an internal logic. You can see her refining a theme, then moving on in a new direction, returning to an earlier obsession or throwing several ideas together. Her entirely abstract work seems self-contained, but retains links with the real world, says curator Paul Moorhouse. It is about what Riley called in a 1984 essay the "pleasures of sight," joys she first experienced as a child in Cornwall, swimming in the sea while the sun bounced off its shifting surface.

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Throughout her career Riley has used her famous optical illusions to make the viewer see things that aren't there. "It's not just to do with what's on the surface but what's inside your head," says Moorhouse. One of her earliest black-and-white works is White Discs 2 (1964) — an arrangement of black spots on a white ground. Look at it, though, and you begin to see flickering white spots — the afterimages of the black areas. Some of the early works, like the field of triangles Tremor (1962), seem to exist in three dimensions — to reside on a warped canvas. The jagged black lines of Blaze 1 (1962) and the ripples of Current (1964) create an illusion of color. Later, elements that ought to be 3-D (twisted threads, lattices) look flat; those that ought to be flat (stripes, waves) bulge or recede.

After bursting into color in 1967, Riley used the way the eye sees the ghost of a shade's opposite (green-red, turquoise-orange) to make hallucinatory hues. In Veld (1971), diagonal stripes in vivid green contain narrow stripes of white, bordered by infinitesimal lines of red — but you could swear the white was yellow. From jazzy stripes she moved on to paler, pastel ripples. Undulations of pink, lilac, jade and ochre make Song of Orpheus 5 (1978) positively pretty, even gentle. Inspired by a visit to Egypt in the late '70s, she returned to stripes. In works like Après Midi (1981), she recreated the palette of ancient tombs: terra-cotta, malachite, turquoise, ochre. Her next move, in the '80s, was to interweave the stripes with diagonals, creating a lattice effect. In her latest paintings, such as Apricot and Pink (2001), the stripes have become wide, vertical ripples, intercut with diagonals in increasingly complicated patterns that create bizarre shapes in a new, brighter color range.

• LUCY FISHER | London
• A retrospective of Op Artist Bridget Riley