The state of anxious, entrenched confliction — of both imagery and technique — has become a mainstay of cutting-edge figurative painting, from the chameleon-like styles of Sigmar Polke to the bizarre, acidic narratives of Neo Rauch. With her first solo exhibition in New York, the German-born, Antwerp-based Kati Heck (b. 1979) enters this crowded field, applying a unique blend of boisterousness and diligence to familiar idioms.

Ms. Heck’s six large paintings all depict self-absorbed characters in suggestive but ambiguous scenarios. Against simplified, sometimes schematized backgrounds, the figures seem almost collaged into narratives of non sequiturs. Up-to-date gallery-goers will detect the familiar paradoxes: “spontaneous” marks slashed next to passages of painstaking modeling; surrealistic juxtapositions of objects; cryptic phrases that tweak, without strictly illuminating, the action.

Ms. Heck cheerfully employs all of these techniques, connecting them with a striking facility for academic rendering. The artist is, in fact, an extraordinarily gifted portraitist, capturing the casual expressions of her models with affectionate directness. She proceeds from the naturalistic faces and torsos to a repository of peculiar events: arms turning to green gelatin, or into large dog-bone shapes or a cloven hoof; feet bloating into cartoony outlines. The artist shows a predilection for people with spiky hairs on one leg.

The narratives, such as they are, are utterly, contentedly banal — at least within the context of fast-lane figuration. In the largest painting here, a 17-foot-wide canvas whose German title translates as “No Time for Masterpieces: Ascension Commando” (2007), 10 figures, variously clothed and naked, engage in activities that range from horseback riding on a person to threatening others with an axe. (The “horse” appears to be the artist herself, naked and agreeably chomping a bridle’s bit.) Another nude woman, her trunk turned a fantastic 180 degrees at the waist, seems to want to apply the same twist to the neck of a man waiting patiently next to a potted cactus.

Like the exhibition itself, some of Ms. Heck’s paintings have gleefully scatological titles. “Popo Moment” (2007) depicts a man pensively straddling a large pile of excrement. His head casts a shadow over the crotch of a man standing behind, and the word “Siegfried” dimly emerges from a background of swirling green brushstrokes. “That’s Not How We Do Things Around Here” (2007) depicts three figures gathered around a campfire to toast a wiener, another of Ms. Heck’s favored motifs; large block letters overhead spell out “Brot” (bread), though no loaf is in sight.

Some canvases show extensive reworking. In “Der Neue Tafelrunde” (2007), an entire figure has been blotted out and replaced, while partially painted-over words appear in others. This free-spirited combination of compulsion and tight technique provides the exhibition’s most intriguing moments. At the gallery desk, a book of the artist’s prior work includes smaller versions on paper of such canvases as “Popo Moment.” The reproductions hint at an appealing freshness of execution — a casual facture to match the wild, meandering imagery — while also highlighting the programmatic construction of the large paintings.

Ms. Heck’s unusual signature — with initials topped by a small crown, like a guild’s stamp — and her heavy, shaped wooden frames add a playful whiff of tradition to the proceedings. The artist’s interest in tradition, however, is selective, and in some respects not particularly probing.

She models with the fluency of a master, but without commitment. While her forms convince as volumes, their gestures are undirected by any cohering formal urgency — any urgency of scale or location to make each element particular. In other words, her compositions are as academic as her modeling; if Matisse’s stated hope was to find a modern, formal equivalent of Giotto, Ms. Heck appears to want to jumpstart the academic painter Bouguereau with twists of technique and narrative. This puts her substantial talents in a peculiar light: in full dress, but no place to go — except a spirited submission to the twin conventions of academic forms, on the one hand, and postmodernist tactics of subversion on the other.

Still, Ms. Heck’s contributions to contemporary figuration are unique. Next to the bitter, upending weirdness of Mr. Rauch, her rebelliousness has the air of almost wholesome mischief. The diligence of her wackiness might be evidence of a Second Generation Postmodernism, in which the paradoxes not only have become platitudes (to paraphrase a former teacher of mine), but are so ubiquitous as to become invisible. We’re left with talent and a lively personality — once indispensable faculties for the worlds of fashion and show biz, but now of art, too.

Until March 1 (745 Fifth Ave., between 57th and 58th streets, 212-752-2929).