In Alfred Leslie’s long artistic career, he has worked in film, theater, writing, and painting. On the occasion of his current exhibition at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art, he pointed out that the polyglot life of working in different media and earning a living, “could easily all turn out to be a dispiriting enterprise, in which you have a workable entrée into different mediums, but not really any real skills in any of them.” Instead, there is a thread that runs through all of his work, connected by his interest in the disjuncture of Brechtian theater, which jolts the audience out of comfortable illusion.

His current exhibition of large figure paintings from between the 1960s and the 1990s is no exception: Mr. Leslie maintains they are absolutely “anti-naturalistic.” He said, “I put all of the people in my pictures onstage. Everything about it is unnatural and unreal.” One reason for this is he paints from four focal points, or what he terms “four horizons” — raising or lowering himself or the model in his studio so he can separately keep the model’s head, chest, abdomen, and hands in close focus. He does all of this within the same canvas, creating the impression of a kind of heightened yet unnatural reality.

Mr. Leslie is a native New Yorker. After serving in the Coast Guard during World War II, Mr. Leslie enrolled at New York University on the GI Bill, studying with the artists William Baziotes and Tony Smith. Even then, Mr. Leslie was an “interdisciplinarian.” He showed artwork and screened films at gatherings of Studio 35, a cooperative of NYU professors and students. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he became friendly with the New York School of painters and poets — Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Allen Ginsberg. He also met Richard Bellamy, who would later be his dealer. Mr. Leslie’s painting was selected by the critic Clement Greenberg for a show of “new talent” at the Kootz Gallery in 1950. His painting of the 1950s, though firmly rooted in Abstract Expressionism, also employed a montage system by dividing the surface into quarters.

In the 1960s, Mr. Leslie’s painting took a dramatic turn, when he began a massive series of standing, frontal male and female nudes, as well as selfportraits painted in grisaille. But Mr. Leslie said the change was not as radical as it seems. “At the time, I was recognizing that modernism itself had become part of the academy. … It wasn’t any much different at that time than the Salon painting.” He also said he believes all painting is essentially abstract. What it comes down to is that “you come before a physical object and you feel something and you have to examine what that is.”

By the fall of 1966, Mr. Leslie had completed between 40 and 50 monumental grisailles in his studio at Broadway and 23rd Street. A show of this work was in the early planning stages at the Whitney Museum. But on October 17, a fire that began in the basement of a brownstone on East 22nd Street spread to his loft building. Mr. Leslie escaped with his wife at the time and their son, Joseph, but his studio and all of his work — film footage, paintings, sculpture, documentation, and personal possessions — were destroyed. The fire also claimed the life of 12 firefighters. The event transformed his life and career. Mr. Leslie was forced to move out of his spacious, light-filled loft and begin again. Even today, he said, the artist “does not readily accept the loss.” Mr. Leslie now lives and works in the East Village; he has three children from previous marriages, and has lived with Nancy De Antonio for 17 years.

Included in the Ameringer Yohe show, which closes Saturday, are two pieces produced recently that he calls “surrogates” — scaled reproductions of paintings lost in the fire. They are digital inkjet prints on stretched canvases joined together into a 9-foot-by-6-foot object, printed off of negatives salvaged from the studio rubble. Mr. Leslie considers them “the most important things in the exhibition.” The show also includes the paintings he made in the decades after the fire: more grisaille figures, as well as “narrative” figure group compositions and drawings. The technology now exists to make scaled reproductions of the lost work feasible, artistically and financially. He said he hopes to produce surrogates for all of his lost grisailles and make a show of them.

Mr. Leslie relies on research as part of his process. This is especially evident in paintings such as his series, “The Killing Cycle,” based on Frank O’Hara’s death in a car accident at Fire Island in 1966. Mr. Leslie examined weather patterns and other details of the scene in his many preparatory studies. Still, Mr. Leslie maintains that he is not a programmatic artist. He explained: “I have an idea, I put it into motion, but it has to be tested in relationship to experience. I step back and look at my work and say, Okay, are you feeling anything?”