When Thomas Nozkowski’s paintings were first reviewed by The New York Sun in November 2003, this critic wrote: “His tight, awkward, oddball style excites a fanatical following in the New York art world, but there hasn’t been a corresponding commercial or institutional take-up as yet.” Things have changed. While this painter’s painter continues to enjoy near-cult status among fellow practitioners, his international career is now on a rapid ascent. He was included in the Venice Biennale last summer, and was given a retrospective by the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz, Germany, at the same time. The 63-year-old painter is now preparing museum shows in Dublin and Montreal. And since joining the PaceWildenstein gallery last year, his prices have more than doubled. You could say he is taking off like a Harrier Jump Jet, only after a gentle cruise along a very long runway.

His debut show with PaceWildenstein overlaps with a display of earlier works, mostly from the 1980s, at the Fisher Landau Center for Art in Long Island City, making it a good time to take stock of his achievements. What is striking are two seemingly contradictory impressions. First, that a Nozkowski of 1979 has all the same painterly DNA as a work of this year, just as the show as a whole maintains a consistency of values, an unmistakable personal touch. Second, that this artist never repeats himself.

Each work is highly distinct in character and formal invention. Even an astute connoisseur would be hard-pressed to locate specific Nozkowskian tropes. There are some recurring motifs, but internal scale, texture, and mood present themselves in different coordinates. This is the more remarkable because Mr. Nozkowski’s modus operandi is so prescribed in terms of scale, medium, taste, and authentic touch. seriousness and scale. The pictures at the Fisher Landau are all 16 by 20 inches. At PaceWildenstein, they follow the marginally larger format of 22 by 28 inches first introduced in his last show at Max Protetch in 2006. (The current show also includes paintings on paper of similar dimensions.) But there is still an overriding sense of reined-in forces, of reticence and containment.

There is no sign of success going to this artist’s head or, worse still, his heart: He is ever the maverick, delighting in quirks and conceits, in jolie-laide color contrasts and self-mocking awkwardness. A Nozkowski painting typically looks to be slow in the making. They are defiantly ungestural yet always handmade, with lines and shapes that are deliberative yet rarely hard-edged.

There is always a sense of crafted deliberation. He prefers pictorial intelligence over painterly flourish.

One of the things that set Mr. Nozkowski’s work apart from the high modernism that dominated the painting scene when he launched his career was a pronounced figure-ground relationship, and this remains a constant in his aesthetic, although there is a new attitude toward the ground.

While his grounds have always been animated, even when largely monochromatic, or a dripped field, as is the case with many pieces at the Fisher Landau, in his mature work at PaceWildenstein there is a sense, sometimes, of the ground edging out the figure to become, as it were, the hero of this pictorial drama.

“Untitled (8–101)” (2008), for instance, presents irregular, wavy vertical bands of light pastel colors, each demarcated by what look like rows of little triangular beads, each putting you in mind, perhaps, of Brancusi’s “Endless Column.” Left like this, there would be no sense of whether the serial arrangement constitutes the figure or the ground — that dichotomy, so central to Mr. Nozkowski’s formal syntax, would seem finally to have dissolved. But then, linking the chains between pink, sand, and blue stripes are slight “X” forms that assert themselves, tentatively, as the figures of this composition.

Similarly, in “Untitled (8–103)” (2008) there are two proliferating patterns: one resembling wood grain in washy red against a lighter stain of the same hue, the other made up of trim, evenly executed squares and rectangles of varying size. It is the geometric structure of this second pattern that sets it up as the figure, and its appearing over the other pattern that makes the latter the ground.

Around the time he set out to paint small, Mr. Nozkowski also determined that his work would always remain rooted in things he had observed or experienced, even though these would be disguised from the viewer in resulting abstractions. This has given his work its defining character, and is what makes it awkward, fidgety, and individualistic. While it is rarely possible to say what, with any specificity, his lines, shapes, or textures actually describe, they nonetheless convey the energy of depiction.

You sense the brush thinking aloud. Even where there is random drip or a distressed surface, every gesture seems thought through. And yet the results feel intuited, not calculated. This odd mix of caring and nonchalance, of observation and doodle, of craft and eccentricity, gives his work its gentle tension. A tunester he may be, but he is not light on his feet. On the contrary — and this is the joy of his act — he plods toward lyricism.

Until May 3 (534 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-929-7000).