Considering the richness and ambition of Mamma Andersson’s works currently on view at David Zwirner, it is a surprise that the Swedish painter is only now having her New York debut. Born in 1962, Ms. Andersson has been exhibiting in Stockholm since the early 1990s, and in London since 2002.

Ms. Andersson’s paintings evoke intersections of landscape and interiors, as well as crossovers between different states of mind, experiences of time, and pictorial language. Her paint surfaces – worked, unusually, in a mix of acrylic and oil – vacillate between solid presence and ethereal dissipation. In a beguiling tease, they manage to be at once lush and remote. Her touch is unfailingly delicate, whether the images are naive or masterfully observed.

In the wake of the Museum of Modern Art’s recent Munch retrospective, it is hard not to associate the resonance and poignancy of these 13 paintings with what the art historian Robert Rosenblum coined the “Northern Romantic Spirit.” A Nordic sense of gloom pregnant with meaning comes across in “Backwoods” (2006), a wintry landscape of farmhouses clinging to a mountain slope with a brooding sky overhead, and “Cul-de-Sac” (2006), a wideangle vertical view of a low house amidst sparse birches and a pink sky.

“About a Girl” (2005) depicts a group of stylish young women socializing in a domestic setting. The moods on the faces vary from expectant to resigned, chirpy to ill at ease. The floor-to-ceiling landscape viewed through the curtains behind them is treated in a stylized monochrome to suggest both a Chinese screen and actual terrain.

This title references a Nirvana hit, providing a thematic link with the painter Elizabeth Peyton, who has portrayed Kurt Cobain. Ms. Andersson’s wistful portraits connect to Ms. Peyton as much as they do to a lineup of intense bourgeois women in a Munch sickroom. It makes one think of Ms.Andersson as a point of intersection – between the history of Nordic symbolism and symbolism’s current resurgence, internationally. Her work looks, for instance, to neo-symbolists Luc Tuymans and Peter Doig.

The show’s title painting, “Rooms Under the Influence” (2006), is painted on a stack of three panels, each 2 feet by 8 feet. In the lower two slats, the same room is shown four times in varying states, each tableau floating upon an expansive landscape that also fills the top slat. In the bottom slat, the rooms are inverted, as if viewed in a reflecting pool. They represent pockets of compressed space within a long, credible perspective.

Play spot-the-difference and you notice that in one room there is a curtain pulled in its pendant to reveal an inner chamber.In the top two rooms,the walls are mottled, aqueous, bubbling into a state of consciousness. In the lower, inverted rooms, the forms melt further into abstraction: Upside down, in the bottom right room, the yellow couch reduces to a primal “little yellow patch,” like the Vermeer detail that lures one of Proust’s characters to his final moment of consciousness.

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Ms. Andersson has a kindred spirit in Silke Otto-Knapp, a German artist who lives and works in London. Born in 1970, Ms. Otto-Knapp also explores an ambiguous space between the solid and the ethereal, the palpable and the schematic. Her medium is watercolor on canvas, which she uses, counterintuitively, to deny transparency.

Whereas Ms. Otto-Knapp’s earlier work explored exotic landscapes with bewildering fastidiousness,she turns toward flatness, figuration, and interior space in the images on view at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, which depict highly stylized dancers, solo or in ensembles. The artist works from photographs, whether found or taken herself. While she invests the images with personal handwriting, they retain a photographic quality that recalls Man Ray’s solarizations, in which negative and positive forms trade places.

Ms. Otto-Knapp uses silver pigment to extraordinary effect. Her nearmonochrome paintings have a handmade feel when viewed from close up; despite their opacity, there is a sense of surfaces built up from overlapping veils. But from the middle of the gallery, the canvases resemble aluminum panels; as they become legible, the figures look like areas that have been burnished or etched. Works like “Figures and Flags” (2006) demand to be viewed at odd angles because headon they are often impossible to read.

“A Girl Almost Like You” (2006) depicts five mannequin ballerinas stepping onto an off-kilter, geometrically patterned dance floor. These voluptuous stick figures recall Oskar Schlemmer’s robotic figures; other images of dancers, including a portrait of Yvonne Rainer, bring to mind Alex Katz’s dancers, in which the collision of ease and artifice in the depiction echoes the sitters’ craft.

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The human-mannequin dichotomy in Ms. Otto-Knapp’s work brings to mind an 1810 essay by the German Romantic Heinrich von Kleist, for whom marionettes embodied the principle that grace is dependent on the absence of self-consciousness. This theory is more likely to find rejoinder than confirmation in the work of the American artist Laurie Simmons.

The current show at Sperone Westwater presents Ms. Simmons’s recent and historic photographic works utilizing performances and stage constructions. The exhibition complements her debut film, “Music of Regret,” which screened three times at MoMA last month.

For her photographs, Ms. Simmons constructs elaborate set-ups involving stage sets, dance props, and mannequins. She then creates slick, largeformat images, coolly distant in their heavy frames, that confuse reality and artifice, absence and presence.

Her film plays to a familiar tune. Three sequences are based on different series of her work dating back to the 1980s, all set to a Broadway-like score by Michael Rohatyn. In one, Meryl Streep (in a singing role), engages in a series of romantic tableaux with a Charlie Mc-Carthy-like mannequin. The story elaborates upon an image by Ms. Simmons from 1994 in which a masked female ventriloquist is surrounded by a merrygo-round of mannequin clones in differing attire.

Another scene presents a dance audition in which real dancers inhabit, from the waist up, person-sized constructions of such objects as a pocket watch, a house, a book, or a gun.This is based on “Magnum Opus II (the Bye-Bye)” (1991), a Simmons photograph after the artist’s own fabricated figures, in which the plastic legs look to be appropriated from dolls. In the film, they are the lovely, skillful legs of members of the Alvin Ailey II company. Just as the move from a dummy to Meryl Streep signifies progress in production values, the dutifully efficient photography of Ms. Simmons gives way to the exquisite crispness of cinematographer Ed Lachman.

Ms. Simmons’s modus operandi relates to that of Hans Bellmer, who photographed his own perverse, surreal constructions of prosthetic limbs and store-window mannequin body parts. Her work begs comparison to a mustsee show of over 70 vintage prints of Bellmer “poupees” at Ubu Gallery. Somehow, Ms. Simmons’s remote sangfroid pales besides the misanthropic, intense Bellmer, who is at once cruelly voyeuristic and emotionally invested. As Kleist put it, for the mannequins to come to life, the puppeteer must dance.

Andersson until June 24 (525 W. 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-727-2070).The gallery declined to disclose its prices.Otto-Knapp until June 17 (620 Greenwich Street, between Morton and Leroy Streets, 212-627-5258).The gallery declined to disclose its prices. Simmons until June 30 (415 W.13th Street,between Greenwich and Washington Streets, 212-999-7337). Prices: $14,000-$50,000. Bellmer until July 28 (416 E. 59th Street, between York and First Avenues, 212-753-4444). Prices: $25,000-$125,000.