Willem de Kooning and Donald Judd don’t seem to have much in common. One gave feverish dimensionality to paint; the other made sculpture seamlessly emblematic. Both, though, tried their hand at printmaking, reproducing their ideas and energy on flat, moderate-size pieces of paper. The nearly 20 abstract prints at Mary Ryan intriguingly catch de Kooning, Judd, and 12 other artists — most of them known primarily as painters or sculptors — at a point where their interests momentarily intersect in the discipline of printmaking.

With “Minnie Mouse” (1971), de Kooning manages to squeeze a surprising amount of his painter’s gusto into the relative confines of a lithograph. His twisting gestures fill the surface, but it’s the textures of the ink — streaking and bubbling, instead of piling and cresting like his paint — that provides the visual tension. (Minnie’s shoes are identifiable, though her ears may elude the viewer.) Alongside, Lee Krasner’s untitled lithograph (1970–71) relies more on rhythmic gesture; here, a lively configuration of knotted lines, suggesting a figure or animal, loosely repeats as theme and variation. Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series lends itself particularly well to printmaking, judging from his “Twelve” (1985), a slightly larger — nearly 4-foot-high — lithograph that moves through luminous deep blues, greens, and reddishbeiges.

For me, Minimalist thinking becomes a bit elliptical when reproduced as fine art prints; philosophically, isn’t this reducing the irreducible stance of “objecthood”? Still, four untitled Donald Judd woodcuts (1991–94), all variations of a comb-like pattern of red bars, display a pleasing progression of design.

Ellsworth Kelly uses color more interactively, constraining a yellow rectangle within a taut ultramarine oval in his lithograph “Blue and Yellow” (1965). Richard Serra’s “Muddy Waters” (1987) necessarily lacks the tactile heft of his sculptures, but its medium — silkscreen and oil stick — attains a certain waxy density. Here, an angular black stretches from the lower edge, all but meeting the top and sides; its aspirations for the heroic impress as much as its actual 6-foot height. Larger still, Joan Mitchell’s 7-foot-wide lithograph “Trees I” (1982) employs the physical scale of Action Painting to envelope the viewer with fearless, jagged verticals of red, black, and yellow.

Rounding out the installation are prints by Dorothy Napangardi, Twombly, Motherwell, Calder, and Le-Witt, as well as two artists closely associated with printmaking: Stanley William Hayter, whose etching and aquatint “Medusa” (1958) is crisscrossed by evocative purplish and greenish-blue tendrils; and Michael Mazur, a painter and printmaker whose “Pond Edge IV” (2005) combines etching, aquatint, woodcut and silkscreen. His greens, brownish purples, and yellowy whites coalesce into a receding plane reminiscent of Monet’s “Water Lilies” paintings, but circling blue strokes resist the perspective, adhering to the print’s surface. Over all this Mr. Mazur has laid a cool, translucent layer of grass-shaped marks, textured by a very fine woodgrain pattern. This dreamlike image, technically the most complex print here, suggests an artist equally at home with paint or printmaker’s ink.

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Most of the seven painters included in “Variations of New York” are members of the “Street Painters,” a 30-year-old group with the old-fashioned obsession of capturing en plein air the colorful sights of our city.These are artists who would, in short, rather resurrect Vlaminck than reshuffle Duchamps. This flies in the face of everything fashionable, and indeed their dancing brushstrokes and sparkling colors occasionally recall the fare at sidewalk art shows. The 14 works at AFP Galleries, however, also include plenty of instances of painterly insight and vigor.

Like most paintings here, Richard Rash’s two canvases boast an expressionistic impasto. Subtle tensions among vibrant oranges, pinks, and greens in his “House, City Island” (2005) convey a vividly sunlit façade tucked among shadowed buildings. Among Su-Li Hung’s eight tiny canvases from 2001 and 2002, “Flatiron Building” is especially fine, energetically framing the famous skyscraper in an up-close, upturned view that captures distant cornices and shadowy recesses.

With intense, unmodulated hues, Peter Schwarzburg’s “Brooklyn Bridge” (2000) turns a familiar view into a fanciful tapestry of arches, clouds, and far buildings, all bumping eachother in a naïvely flattened space. Simon Gaon’s canvases are the incarnation of “juicy”; the restless, liquid strokes and full-speed colors of his “View of Hudson (Maxwell House)” (1988) convey surprisingly specific qualities of light. Three canvases by Richard Ahntholz from his series “Orange Path in East Hampton” (2002–04) show a mastery of the fleeting, calligraphic sketch, though (as elsewhere in the show, especially in the work of Messrs. Schwarzburg and Gaon) the eagerness of attack sometimes overwhelms a discrimination between crucial and the secondary elements.

Richard Sloat’s cubist watercolors of skyscrapers evocatively contrast warm and cool darks with limpid light yellows and blues. His “Passage Between” (1991) deftly draws the eye from streetlevel to a view, far overhead, of the moon crossing between high-rises.And Myron Heise’s “50th Street and Broadway” (1997) may be the exhibition’s most poignant portrait of a building. In this night scene, nuances of color and overlapping planes capture the bulk of a skyscraper, gleaming darkly beyond other buildings perforated by the bright office lights and store signs. In the foreground, a patch of light silhouettes a truck driver in his cab, capturing his solitary contribution to the city’s pulse.

Abstract Prints until August 18 (24 W. 57th St.,between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-397-0669). Prices: $2,250–$95,000.

“Variations” until August 24 (595 Madison Ave. at 57th Street, 212-230-1003). Prices: $1,200–$20,000.