Two of the three artists in this show share the distinction that their solo efforts are often mistaken for group exhibitions. James Hyde works simultaneously in a variety of directions. Though he has created wall reliefs, freestanding sculptural objects, furniture, and treated photographs, however, he insists on describing himself as a painter. Disparate in medium and appearance, his works test the boundaries of painting: Color adhering to structure is always a feature. He is often compared to the French 1960s “support-surface” group of minimal abstractionists for his formalist antics and his play with language.

By contrast, the neo-romantic Saint Clair Cemin is unlikely to be accused of formalism. His output often strays along such contradictory paths as elegaic classicism, a primitivism invested with sympathetic magic, and a high-tech aesthetic. The latter predominates here.

On this occasion the works by which these artists are represented remain relatively focused. The appropriation art of the third artist in the show, Mr. Cemin’s fellow Brazilian Jac Leirner, revels in a tongue-in-cheek semiotics that bridges Mr. Cemin’s hermeticism and Mr. Hyde’s language games. Ironically, therefore, the threemember show can be mistaken for one man’s retrospective.

Thus, three conceptually consonant categories of object come to cohabit the main, central gallery at Sikkema Jenkins: vitrine-contained painting constructions by Mr. Hyde, vaguely science fair-like sculptural balls by Mr. Cemin, and a wall hanging of bags from museum stores by Ms. Leirner.

In Mr. Hyde’s “Weights and Heats” (2006), a glass box at 8 feet by just more than 5 feet, and 17 1/2 inches deep is tilted at a diagonal to the wall. This pristine, meticulously fabricated container accommodates an artfully messy arrangement of papers, stretches of fabric, and paint. The paint is applied in varying thicknesses to the glass support and also adheres to, or reaches across, the appropriated materials. The vitrine does theatrically emphasized double duty as surface and support, container and contained.

The sense of wayward energy compacted can put the viewer in mind of John Chamberlain’s crushed car parts, while the controlled anarchy recalls Robert Rauschenberg’s early “combines.” But the color and movement each have a chirpiness that keeps them free of existentialist connotations. While there are bursts of carefree exuberance, the neat packaging ensures that his isolated moments of expressiveness stay within big quote marks. But somehow, miraculously, such critical selfconsciousness doesn’t cramp their sly exuberance.

In a way, this format (also adopted in two other 2006 works here, “Catalytic” and “Rotational”) relates to the almost ubiquitous use of vitrines in conceptual and neoconceptual work, whether of Joseph Beuys, Jeff Koons, or Damien Hirst. By tipping his vitrines and having the paint adhere to the glass as support, Mr. Hyde both plays on this cool, distancing convention of the vitrine and subverts it. He insists that the glass box, like exposed canvas, has a life of its own.

Mr. Cemin displays five identically shaped sculptured works in different colors: four in polyester resin, colored blue, green, white, and yellow, and the fifth in stainless steel. Each is titled “Supercuia” (2006). A monumental version of the same sculptural form is installed permanently in a park in Brasilia. In the gallery versions, these enigmatic balls are each around 46 inches diameter. With breastlike forms protruding at equal points, they come across as oversized models of some molecular structure. They mix the hightech, in their finish and symmetry, and the biological, in their point of inspiration (the breast form, though perfectly neat and regular, is actually based on a gourd).

Just as Mr. Cemin’s somewhat romantic synthesis of the organic and the mechanical begins to relate to Mr. Hyde’s collision of the wayward and the contained, along comes Ms. Leirner to remind the company that it is just art that’s being talked about. Her “144 Museum Bags” (2006) arranges its titular content in a neat grid, suspending the flat, empty, but slightly crumpled, and thus obviously used bags along plastic-coated steel cable. She is evidently well traveled — a sophisticated bag lady — with souvenirs from galleries across the United Kingdom (lots of Tate purple, for instance), America, and as far afield as Denmark and Israel. These are arranged with chroma, not geography, as the guiding principle, creating wave patterns of color. Like that of her counterparts, her aesthetic offers a collision of cultures: The bags have a jocular, personal element, but the order to which they are subjected recalls the Constructivism prevalent in Brazil in the 1950s, with its love of grids and systems. Like Mr. Hyde, with his throwback to French structuralist abstraction of the 1960s, and Mr. Cemin, whose syntheses and bipolarities are redolent of 1940s artists who fused Surrealism and abstraction, Ms. Leirner presents a nostalgia for the radical inquiry of yesteryear.

Until January 27 (530 W. 22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-929-2262).