Amid the endless combinations of media competing for art world support, abstract art continues to garner attention. As Agnes Martin once said,”Anything can be painted without representation.”

The grid-based format of the nine human-scaled paintings in “Color Paintings” is becoming veteran abstract painter Pat Lipsky’s recognizable trademark structure. It places her in the company of such reductive, contemplative painters as Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, and Agnes Martin. Five vertical columns of varying widths are divided at points that in cross section appear as ascending and descending steps that dip down or rise up in the center. Often, three narrow columns frame two wider columns.The symmetrically deployed colors allow for myriad associations; they could be landscapes viewed through a colonnade, renaissance façades, geometric patterns, ornamental motifs, or blocky figures.

In “Proust’s Sea” (2006), two central columns feature colors that recall sky and earth are framed by three columns of colors that recall earth and sea.Naming the blues, greens, umbers, and teals become a fruitless exercise because these carefully mixed hues defy a fixed identity. One is apt not to notice the mastery of color because it all seems just right. The blues, at once radiant and atmospheric, are activated by the somber tones of browns and greens. The handling of the edges adds vitality and one could become mesmerized simply following the lines, spaces, smudges, and blurs that separate the segments.

The surfaces are delightfully polluted with traces of dust, hairs, and blobs of dried paint. These are hand-made paintings, and although they may make allusions to an ideal, they are full of the irregularities and imperfections of life.

Kim Uchiyama and Barry Goldberg also make work that participates in a late modernist conversation. But while Ms. Uchiyama explores the poles of expansion in her brightly colored abstractions, Mr. Goldberg mines the poles of reduction in his spare oil and encaustic canvases.

In the exhibit “Strata,” Ms. Uchiyama’s landscape-based abstractions come in a portrait format of stacked horizontal bands of colors. Muscular strokes of thick oil paint, in varying widths, span the surface and are interrupted by intervals of segmented color blocks. Her expressive paint handling brings to mind the built-up surfaces and rough-edged strokes of Sean Scully; however, the space she evokes is decidedly more referential. In “Untitled” (2006), saturated hues of red, yellow, and blue are tempered by occasional off-whites and lighter blues. Thin lower bands of dark colors seem compressed by the weight, heat, and vitality of wide red and yellow bands in the upper layers, serving as an apt metaphor for the effects of time upon landscapes and civilizations.

Barry Goldberg’s paintings at first seem to be primarily about ground. In most of the works on view from 2006, a thin, colored frame of buttery encaustic color is superimposed upon a field of oil color.This thin frame seems to delineate a figure within the field. It unsettles and in some cases reverses the reading of what is figure and what is ground. “City Square in the Rain” (2006), 55 inches by 42 inches, brings to mind the rounded shape of a subway car window.A 2-inch-wide blue encaustic stripe circumnavigates the canvas; its position an inch or so from the edge creates an outer frame of olive green ground. Inside, an atmospheric gray-blue area recalling a foggy, rain soaked window is streaked with occasional vertical lines, traces left by the sharp edge of the tool as it pulled successive layers of oil color down the surface. At once, alluding to rain as in the title, these hair like marks also describe with considerable clarity the process of how the work was made.

Lipsky until November 11 (529 W. 20th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-463-9666);

Uchiyama until October 21 (205 Norman Ave. at Humboldt Street, Brooklyn, 718-383-9380);

Goldberg until October 28 (529 W. 20th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 646-486-7004).