Reductive art induces reductive histories of art. When you think about art in terms of what is left out it is hard not to historicize, to see individuals in terms of a great march forward — or compromising retreat — toward or away from Minimalism. In this ne plus ultra 1960s movement, abstract art achieved its most severe exclusions. It beckoned to an end of painting, or at least its submission to the object, soon to be followed by the triumph of pure concept.

Individualists frustrate such neat theorizing. Almost simultaneous with Minimalism was the movement that logically ought to have waited patiently in the wings for a few years: Postminimalism. This word described the gradual reinvestment of personal touch, expressive feeling, rich surface, and human presence in nonetheless still radically pared-down artworks.

A new kind of painting emerged that seemed torn between giving way to historical inevitability and resisting it. Robert Ryman and Brice Marden fit that description. Another of the masters of that moment was Robert Mangold. His career has been one long pirouette — his paintings are perpetually on the tipping point between reduction and regeneration.

Two elements, the shaped canvas and the drawn arc, stand out as the hallmarks of Mr. Mangold’s aesthetic. To these can be added a third: Whether stained in a color or rubbed using a drawing medium such as graphite, he goes for an achieved (rather than simply given) surface. While never overtly gestural, his art always recalls a hand that made it. Cool, but not cold; impersonal, but not person-free.

Mr. Mangold also likes to flutter between the sensual and the cerebral. His new show at PaceWildenstein’s cavernous West 22nd Street venue offers a dozen in a series of “column structures.” They can all be taken in at the center of this vast space as a single gestalt, becoming highly architectural in the process; or they can demand individual space and time. The supports are made from various joined canvases to form such shapes as a “T” in “Column Structure I” (2005), a trunk and branch in “IV” (the remainder of the series are 2006), a funnellike shape in “V,” an anvil in “VI,” and quite unnamable shapes in others. The ability or inability describe the shapes linguistically seems to determine different formal experiences from one column to the next.

The compositions are further complicated by scored lines that can easily be confused with the actual division between abutting canvases. The lines roughly adhere to some sense of a grid that stretches beyond the actual work, but no strict logic or system is apparent. Each work is a singular color, stained in acrylic with even modulation but slight fluctuations — again, the hand is present but not insistent.

The curves, drawn by a superbly controlled hand, are neither mechanical nor organic. They might be seen as responses to the shaped supports, but equally could be the formal force that determines those shapes.

The cumulative experience of all this back and forth between possibilities is subtle, classical, and highly refined. The Minimalist Sol LeWitt, when describing his own return to more lyrical and sensually involved picture making, once spoke of wanting to make art he could show Giotto. Mr. Mangold might want to show his work, with its sustained emotional containment, to Poussin.

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Mark Grotjahn is a natural complement to Mr. Mangold. His highly refined show at the Anton Kern Gallery — another elegantly sparse postindustrial space — offers slight variations on a singular composition and formal idea, and a narrative sense of development as the eye follows this progression

My first visit induced a negative response. Unlike Mr. Grotjahn’s restrained installation of richly colored pieces at the Whitney Museum recently, the dark, barely scrutable canvases with their repeated compositional formula seemed gratuitous and stingy. But a second visit on a sunny day showed off their subdued sophistication.

Mr. Grotjahn is fanatically committed to his chosen motif: a central vertical strip from the horizontal center of which emanate spokes of slightly thinner stripes. Coming with modernist ancestry, this device is familiar from various Futurists and Orphists not to mention Marsden Hartley, and evokes a sense of a lighthouse emitting rays.

In the dingy half-light of my first visit, this seemed like a series of black paintings. But in fact, they eschew black altogether to track a progression from a dark but vibrant ultramarine to an almost pitchblack navy blue. All painting needs light but these dramatize that dependence. The strokes are compulsively even but the brush creates striations that seem to glisten under light, looking a bit like the sheen of black vinyl LPs. (Jason Martin, the British painter who shows at Robert Miller and LA Louver in Mr. Grotjahn’s city of residence, Los Angeles, has made a life’s work from this effect.)

While the motif and its driving effects are always present and insistent, the slight and subtle differences between each work eventually assert themselves.

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Joe Fyfe is a brutalist. His art is not so much reductive as severely blunt. Often, the “canvas” is more striking than the paint: In “La Gloire” (2006), for instance, a picture painted in acrylic on terry cloth, felt, linen and burlap. Colors and textures alike are instrinsic, in other words, rather than applied. The composition has a central zip of various colors (painted bars or collaged strips of colored material) placed off center on a burlap ground crudely roller-painted in thin, dry white. The surface submits to the support.

Mr. Fyfe comes out of the art of the early 1970s: He was much influenced at the outset of his career by an exhibition of Blinky Palermo, an artist included in the National Academy Museum’s current survey of painting in the wake of Minimalism, “High Times, Hard Times.” He is also one of several Americans (others of his generation include James Hyde and Craig Fisher) who have looked hard at the French Support-Surface movement. But his new body of work seems much less concerned with the semiotics of painting as earlier efforts.

The exhibition includes paintings made in the last four years and is more compositionally busy than the previous show at the same gallery. A recent Fulbright scholarship took him to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and titles reflect these recent travels. There is still an insistence on texture over shape. While “Hoan Kiem” (2006) seems almost pictorial in the way menhir-like shapes populate a white ground with a gray skyline, the eye is detained by the rough scrapings and rude applications of paint accentuating the materials beneath.

Mangold until March 10 (545 W. 22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-989-4263);

Grotjahn until February 28 (532 W. 20th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-367-9663);

Fyfe until March 10 (1014 Madison Ave., between 78th and 79th streets, 212-535-5767).