Brian O’Doherty was trained as a physician in Dublin, Ireland, prior to immigrating to America. Once in this country, he worked as an art critic for the New York Times and Art in America, an arts administrator for the National Endowment for the Arts, authored of the influential series of essays “Inside the White Cube,” and wrote a novel, “The Deposition of Father McCreevy,” which was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2000. As a polemicist, critic, and novelist, language is central to his art.

A retrospective at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery contains work that is complicated but primarily visual, such as the site specific installation “Talking With Bramante, Rope Drawing No. 111” (2007), in which the three walls of a small room are covered in brightly colored geometric shapes that suggest architectural forms. Taut, crisscrossing strands of rope are connected to the floor and walls of the room in such a way to suggest receding and jutting spaces.

Some of the works’ meanings are completely dependent upon documentation or a catalog essay. “Art Since 1945” (1975), a carved wooden simulacra of an art history book whose acrylic painted surface is kept behind a glass showcase, is nicely crafted but not much to look at. After reading the detailed typewritten note by the artist displayed on the wall to the side of the artifact, we discover that the artist was commissioned to complete a book by the same title but never got around to writing it because he rejected the format. The note is funny and engaging and the true heart of the work. The book alone is meaningless: Mr. O’Doherty, like many other conceptual artists, uses language to undermine the image or to create parallel worlds that complicate the experience of viewing physical objects. His rich oeuvre is informed by a political consciousness, a dry wit, and a critical approach to art-world mechanisms.

This wide-ranging exhibition includes aluminum and Plexiglas minimalist sculptures, Liquitex paintings, and intuitively diagrammatic drawings that all relate to the ancient Gaelic language Ogham, which is made up of parallel lines and notches and which Mr. O’Doherty called “the most simple, logical, beautiful of sign systems.” Mr. O’Doherty also made diagrammatic drawings that relate to his fascination with the spatial relationships of the chessboard (he shares this with Samuel Beckett, among other things), labyrinths, and the relationships between the five senses.

“Kip’s Bay: The Body and Its Discontents” (1964) combines history and human anatomy and physiology. The artist created a rectangular filing system in which small color-coded boxes, with various human diseases and ailments and anatomical terminology labeled on all four sides of them, are placed in compartments in straight rows, with a few of them removed from the filing box and placed on the white pedestal. This perhaps has to do with genetics and the rules of chance. This and other similar works also relate to Mr. O’Doherty’s interest in the formal structure of language. A number of drawings in this exhibition, which can also be considered plays of sorts, highlight this interest. “Structural Play: Violence” (1968) is a diagram or script made up of a number of small grids on which the letters A and B appear along with direction lines indicating where each “actor” should move when briskly speaking such lines as “YOU’RE DEAD.”

His other work includes various presentations of the results of an electrocardiogram he performed on Marcel Duchamp, and a large digital photograph of Mr. O’Doherty dressed up as his four aliases, a hidden political protester, a female magazine editor, a 19th-century Irish poet, and an art historian. Turning a paper record of Duchamp’s heart rate into art could be a form of idolatry or mockery.

A video projection of a performance of “Vowel Grid” (1970) uncovers Mr. O’Doherty’s interest in ancient languages and numerological systems. Two anonymous, white clad and hooded males move in straight lines to and fro across a large gray grid that is placed directly on the ground. Before they move they shout out a vowel from the Ogham language. The diagrammatic drawings on the walls surrounding the projection explain Mr. O’Doherty’s coding of the vowels. Human agents are reduced to nonentities, obeying the laws of the code and limiting their movements to the grid.

Until July 14 (100 Washington Square East at Washington Place, 212-998-6780).