In the Nancy Graves thesaurus, “baroque,” “surreal,” and “1980s” are synonyms. Although of the generation of Yalies that included Chuck Close, Rackstraw Downes, Janet Fish, Robert and Sylvia Mangold, Brice Marden, and her former husband, Richard Serra, Graves really came into her own in that brash, gaudy decade of postmodernism.

Despite attempts at conceptual art and serialism, she was temperamentally ill-suited to restraint. On the contrary, her work is shamelessly exotic, characterized by iconographic inclusiveness and visual overload. She fearlessly experimented with polyurethane paint and anodizing processes in her sculpture and hybrid works. This had joyous results for her art and tragic ones (the artist believed) for her health. She died of cancer in 1995.

Since then, Graves has been kept in the public eye by a diligent estate that recently moved her representation to Ameringer & Yohe. In recent weeks they have offered a retrospective in two parts. Work of the 1970s were shown at February’s ADAA fair at the Park Avenue Armory. Back at the gallery, there is a concentration on the 1980s and afterward, when she really hit her stride.

Her later work continued earlier thematic concerns with zoology and archaeology, but took these to new heights of ornamental exuberance and chromatic excess. “Varilev” (1981) for instance, is another of her skeleton reconstructions; this time a prehistoric looking head, spine, and tail surmount what looks like a brass pole fixed to a base on wheels. The work is an enigmatic collision of languages and attitudes: scientifically accurate modeling on top, playful appropriation beneath.

“Varilev” also directly recalls David Smith’s frequently repeated device of making his sculptures mobile in this way, like farm machinery. A curious feature of Graves’s postmodernism was that, despite its very of-the-moment color and attitude, it often looked back with nostalgia to the innocent playfulness of pioneer modernists. Besides Smith, there are shades of Calder and Picasso in her sculptural wit, and of lesser-known Americans Herbert Ferber, Richard Stankiewicz, and Ibram Lassaw in her more menacing entomological forms.

Color can have the effect of unifying disparate elements within a single work without diminishing the sense of juxtaposition, of surreal meeting. A sculpture like “Axis” (1986) brings together the forged and the found, the natural and the synthetic, exotic hand coloring and down-at-the-heels rust. It is fluid, provisional, and at the same time rather compelling, as if a new life form had been caught at a precarious moment of evolution.

With the turn to the 1990s, Graves’s color reached new heights (or should that be depths?) of extremity. “The Dawn of Gothic Form” (1990) is a diptych, with one canvas placed slightly higher than the other, joined by an elaborate anodized aluminum cutout form of an ancient Egyptian head in delicate filigree. The swirling forms in the abstract imagery behind recall Kandinsky, only in shrill, synthetic colors and appropriated textures whose contrasting fuss and nonchalance ranges from printed graphics to graffiti.

“Rustle in Ripe Corn” (1992) incorporates a cast of a Javanese cutout puppet (of Kali, perhaps, the appropriate deity for Graves’s aesthetic WHY?) to create an image of the encrusted intensity and preciousness of Gustave Moreau. The gaudily excessive composite reliefs exploit photo-etched magnesium and various enamels from 1992, looking like brash city cousins of Lee Bontecou’s delicate, intricate zoo morphs of the same period. In a kind of cultural contradiction that they seem to relish, the chromatic effects are at once ethereal and funky, out of time and out of the ghetto.

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Graves keeps company on 57th Street with another welcome, overdue retrospective for an American sculptor, the Sidney Geist survey at Jason Mc-Coy. Of an older generation than Graves, Mr. Geist is still with us, though sadly the 91-year-old artist suffered a stroke on the eve of his show.

Mr. Geist is as renowned a scholar as an artist. He is a leading authority on Brancusi and the author of a study of Cezanne that makes controversial claims about hidden, unconscious imagery in his paintings. McCoy has gathered works dating back to the 1930s and up to the 1990s.

In the first decades there was a slow, dutiful apprenticeship to Brancusi and other classic modernists (many of his works from the 1950s look like Tanguy personages come to three-dimensional life) and a quiet kinship to Noguchi. Later the work blossoms into the wilder, more personal totems that are his claim to sculptural originality.

For Mr. Geist, like Graves, color is the great liberator. His carving style is understatedly voluptuous, but color really ups the ante in a work like “Femme – Fleur” (1989-92), a sexy, surrealist sculptural pun. The tapering, striped totems of his most recent period are classy and serene.

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OK Harris, meanwhile, is showing an impressive body of work by another veteran sculptor, Philip Pavia. He was the secretary of the legendary Club in Greenwich Village, where the abstract expressionists gathered in the 1940s and 1950s. It was he who, at a riotous New Year’s Eve party there in 1949, ecstatically declared that the first half of the century belonged to Paris, the second to New York. He was also a belligerent partisan for abstraction, pulling together a single-issue magazine of abstract artists’ writings, “It Is.”

His terra-cotta heads leave behind such polemics. Like his more abstract “temple” structures of the last decade, these painted terracotta heads exude a rough-hewn classicism. Installed to dramatic effect in one of Harris’s cavernous galleries on mammoth, relatively high pedestals, the works have the chilly ambiguity of Roman funerary heads, at once austere and absorbed.

Graves until April 2 (20 W. 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-445-0051). Prices: $12,000-$200,000.

Geist until April 1 (41 E. 57th Street, at Madison Avenue, 212-319-1996). Prices: $3,000-$60,000.

Pavia until April 9 (383 W. Broadway, between Spring and Broome Streets, 212-431-3600). Prices: $2,500-$22,000.