Jonathan Borofsky was ubiquitous on the international art scene in the 1980s. That was due to the scale of his work, its disarmingly obstinate simplicity, and (depending on your view) its calmingly or infuriatingly repetitive imagery. “The Hammering Man” is a piece that has proliferated in several ways: Five identical examples of the same work filled a hall of the 1982 Documenta festival in Kassel, Germany. The same figure, in cut steel sheets with a moving hammer and arm, has since been installed as permanent, public works at varying heights in Frankfurt, Germany; Seattle, Basel, Switzerland; Dallas, and Seoul, South Korea, which holds the record at 72 feet.

Managing somehow to be at once banal and intriguing, “Hammering Man” is a mix of corporate logo, ideological monument (with its workerist feel), and something oddly poetic. The artist maintains that much of his imagery comes to him in dreams. Another oft-repeated Borofsky motif is a leggy puppet showgirl with a bearded male face, the artist’s own.

Mr. Borofsky’s exhibition of new sculpture at Deitch Projects is his first New York gallery show since 1992. This hiatus marked a career shift, in which he turned his focus toward the realization of public commissions, bypassing the commercial gallery system. Reflecting this, the basement at Deitch has been transformed into a showroom of potential public works, with plastic models and computer mock-ups.

The artist has two idioms on offer, should you be in the market for a public monument. Both motifs explore interconnections of standardized figurines. In the first, alternating male and female identical figures in varying colors are made from plastic and riveted together to form regular, undulating patterns. The largest of these is a free-standing arrangement at 22 1/2 by 12 1/2 feet, at 15 1/2 feet tall. There are also geometric patterns made out of these figures, forming diamonds or figure eights. The figures are doll-like, flat plastic shapes with see-through, vein-like webs inside.

Mr. Borofsky’s second basic module is a more schematic, ungendered homunculus in galvanized steel, which he welds together to form cathedrallike structures. Deitch’s hangar-like space is challenged in scale by “Human Structures (four towers connected)” (2006), at 45 by 11 1/2 feet and 18 feet tall. You may not at first register the human building block: With arms akimbo, they are like rivet forms. Formally, this creates a tension between density and openness.

The models downstairs, in colored plastic, convey a very different sensibility, thanks to the translucence of the material. (The plastic recalls a building block of interlocking slats familiar from my own childhood.) The crystalline shapes these form are sometimes plausibly architectural, other times more futuristic.

The idea for this humanoid link chain seems to have had its origin in a 2003 proposal by Mr. Borofsky for the memorial at ground zero, a tower of 3,024 such figures (the number includes the victims of the 1993 attack on the buildings) ascending heavenward. The combination of this elegaic side of his new work and the use, in his Deitch show, of a musical soundtrack composed and performed by the artist himself — whose intonations remind him, he says in a wall text, of Hebrew and Italian chanting — suggests a newfound religiosity in Mr. Borofsky. At the very least, it is a humanism that contrasts with the hint of menace in his earlier, more morally ambiguous pieces.

It is hard either to love or hate these works, which have a somewhat mail-order public sculpture feel about them: elegant, efficient, and blessed by an unimpeachable universalism.

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No one is going to accuse Paul McCarthy of sentimentality, although his show at Nyehaus, a gallery nestled amid the Victorian artist studios of the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park, does include an installation of heads from “Snow White.” Like the serial repetition of Mr. Borofsky’s Documenta piece, “Dwarf Head (red, chocolate, skin tone, blue, black, light gray, gray)” (2000) consists of seven identical casts of a dwarf’s head in silicon, in the colors of the title, each atop a wooden shipping crate.

Living up to Mr. McCarthy’s typical commitment to insolent banality and visual ungenerosity, this work is, nonetheless, sparing of his usual depths of squalor. Since the 1960s, he has gained notoriety for performances, films, and works in multiple media that scatalogically and sexually explore themes of bodily abjection. He has inspired a generation of acolytes in Los Angeles, where he is based, as a current exhibition of the L.A. scene at the Rubell Collection in Miami demonstrates. His followers include Mike Kelley, who often collaborates with Mr. McCarthy, and the late Jason Rhoades, a work of whose hangs in the Nyehaus exhibition.

Nyehaus presents work in a variety of mediums, but the main event with Mr. McCarthy’s performance is sadly (or luckily) absent except for a grid of still photos. These document “Basement Bunker” (2003), a performance in which, dressed in a rubber President Bush mask, the artist aped many gruesome acts involving amputation and excretion.

There are, however, sculpture pieces, a series of huge photographs (poignant portraits of scruffy, sometimes grotesque, limp rubber masks), and about two dozen drawings that depict a range of explicit activities. These involve many references to smelly behinds, with obscene invective scrawled over cartoons of people penetrating each other with pipecleaners. For so relentlessly scatological an artist, Mr. McCarthy is a suitably cackhanded draftsman, recalling the exact etymology of that expression. This isn’t grafitti with the lyricism or cathartic release of Brassai photographs, or the works of Dubuffet and Basquiat. Instead, they have the feel of public latrine grafitti made under extreme duress — physical, mental, or both.

It is curious that sunny, affluent California should host an artistic school of such dark misery. Mr. McCarthy is clearly in a tradition that includes the performance artist Chris Burden, who on occasions had himself shot or run over by a car, and, a few years ahead of him, Ed Kienholz, whose elaborate sculptural tableaux included scenes of sexual alienation and social decay. Kienholz had an almost Victorian sensibility, recalling Walter Sickert, whereas Mr. McCarthy’s strange antics simultaneously turn up the heat and the cold. The assault on American pop culture is more explicit than in Kienholz, while the wallowing in filth is at once more literal and phantasmagoric. Mr. McCarthy’s landmark early performances, in which, for instance, tomato ketchup would be used to unspeakable ends, fused American Pop Art with Viennese Aktionismus — the 1960s movement that entailed lots of animal sacrifice and self-mutilation.

Borofsky until December 23 (18 Wooster St., between Canal and Grand streets, 212-343-7300);

McCarthy until December 30 (15 Gramercy Park South, between Park Avenue South and Irving Place, 212-995-1785).