Judy Glantzman is one of those painterly extremists who leave you flummoxed. She paints, and occasionally sculpts, unruly heaps of figures and heads that could read, equally convincingly, as exuberant, joyous celebrations of life or awesome, spooky ghost stories. They are like day of judgment paintings – only you have no idea if they show the blessed or the damned.

The quality of her work, like the split personality of her vision, elicits incongruous responses. Her expressionist line and symbolist color evoke, at once, rich art-historical sophistry and the unschooled urgency of outsider art.

Ms. Glantzman has been exhibiting since the early 1980s, when she was associated with the East Village scene. This is her first show with Betty Cuningham, and it packs a punch.Whichever side of the aesthetic or eschatological divides the viewer comes down on, these bizarre, compulsive encrustations of fidgety detail are compelling.

Ten canvases, several around 7 feet high, are joined by a supporting cast of fantastic, gargoyle-like figurines in Model Magic, a children’s modeling material. These are displayed on shelves, whether individually or, in emulation of the paintings, in crowded clusters. They are endearingly oafish, like Daumier’s satirical figures sculpted originally in bread. They also resonate with the clay reliefs of the contemporary sculptor William King, currently at Alexandre Gallery.

Ms. Glantzman’s painted figures, like their modeled counterparts, inhabit an ambiguous space between the comic and the ghoulish, the poignant and the absurd. In the show’s accompanying catalog, Susan Harris cites Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” as a precedent for what she interprets as Ms. Glantzman’s “intense, frenetic, and visionary portrayals.” Touchstones might equally include Ensor, Chagall, Kokoschka, and – in the way her dense accumulations of motifs are at once collectively decorative and individually expressive – Klimt.

Individual canvases have a tight, organizing gestalt,and yet are made up of a bewildering overload of little marks and decisions. “Bird in the Hand” (2006) is one of the most legible of her compositions: There is even a horizon line, a sense of sky, and foreground figures.A great parade of people, forming a kind of Greek chorus, recalls the mourners at Courbet’s “Burial at Ornans.” In front of them, a triad of bald eggheads coalesces into an embryo-like shape. Behind the row of figures in black, and dominating the composition, is a vast multicolored mound of heads, some demented and ghoulish, some smiling and contented looking. It could be an affirmative, mystical vision of the continuum of life – or a scene from the apocalypse.

An untitled 2004 canvas in the main gallery, at 88 inches by 77 inches, achieves a vast sense of scale through a dense accumulation of heads and figures of varying sizes. Some are minute and recede into a deep space; others, more fulsome in their expressions, seem either self-absorbed or frantically seeking to engage the viewer. The palette balances flesh tones with light blues and greens, wielding a sickly lyricism that’s true to the ambiguity at the heart of Ms. Glantzman’s weirdness.

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Evidently,Ms.Glantzman’s reputation precedes her: She is one of eight women selected by the exhibiting artist Joy Walker for a group show at the 55 Mercer cooperative with the no-nonsense title: “Wild Women.”

The definition of wildness supported by this show doesn’t seem all that wayward by contemporary standards. Although most of the artists entertain raw elements, this doesn’t translate to a raucousness that will get anyone arrested.

The naive intensity of Ms. Walker’s landscapes is offset by her control of light.There are intimations of a kindergarten experiment in Fran Kornfeld’s scribbles in marking pens and wax crayon, but again with a sophisticated control of texture and chromatic brightness. Toto Feldman’s ink-and-watercolor paintings on hanging paper hint at the current Darger cult. And there’s a polite edginess to Cindy Feldman’s treated postcards, Elizabeth Bisbing’s collages,and Annette Davidek’s decorative motifs on wood.

The show gets rowdy in the corner where Ms. Glantzman’s spindly, obsessive drawings meet four richly suggestive self-portraits by Susanna Coffey, the best-known artist in the group. Here, Ms. Glantzman works in ballpoint pen, an unconventional drawing medium that resonates sheer insolence and a sense of the throwaway. In her handling, lines are at once awkward and elastic, and she achieves arresting varieties of openness and density. A drawing of a little girl with a sow-like face has the jagged, desperate freedom of drypoint and a sense of the grotesque worthy of Goya.

Ms. Coffey’s paintings belong to a 2005 series, “Water Years,” that was to have shown last summer in New Orleans and whose watery theme ominously anticipated the tragic reason for its cancellation. There are intimations of an unruly spirit in the bright facial decorations she adds to her self-portrait images, but the expressive intensity in her work is the result of fiercely fastidious observation.

These four paintings adhere to a favored format of Ms. Coffey’s: A head – the artist’s – hugs the base of the composition with a more freely improvised landscape above. Its eyes clenched in inner concentration, the almost shriveled head feels almost like an unwrapped mummy – otherwordly and yet at the same time clinically literal. The contrast of head to landscape dramatizes a figure-ground dichotomy that also reflects a tension between imagination and presentness.

Glantzman until May 26 (541 W. 25th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-242-2772). Prices: $1,800-$30,000. “Wild Women” until May 20 (55 Mercer Street, between Broome and Grand Streets, 212-226-8513). The gallery declined to disclose its prices.