I asked a young painter to join me on my first visit to this survey of five decades of Judit Reigl’s work. Though my friend’s art jumps between figuration and blankets of monochrome color, she was surprised that the large gestural canvases hung in the street-facing space of Kamel Mennour’s newest gallery had been made by the same artist as the series of small abstractions that lined a long hallway and the large, cleanly figurative compositions presented in two white rooms at the very end. This sense of surprise is common in encounters with Reigl’s work.

In telling the story of her escape from