Two exhibitions open this Thursday at Ameringer McEnery Yohe. Both of them merit your attention and attendance.

One of them features the work of Suzanne Caporael. “First and foremost, Caporael is a painter,” says the gallery. “While maintaining a discrete distance from the art world in various rural havens, she has nonetheless earned herself a place in the field of contemporary painting. For nearly thirty years she has allowed her avid curiosity to guide her through a variety of disparate areas of study, most of which take two to five years of research and manifest as paintings while Caporael delves more deeply into her sources. These include eighty paintings representing thousands of miles of back roads traveled in the U.S. over a period of four years. Always remaining more allusive than descriptive, the work balances substance and subtlety with aesthetic rigor.”

The other is “Hans Hofmann: Art Like Life is Real.” The gallery continues, “In his essay for the exhibition catalogue, William Agee describes Hofmann as going against the grain of the artistic canon of the day; ‘His art was too big, too bold, to be encapsulated in a few years after 1945, the years we generally identify as the heyday of abstract expressionism.’ Instead, Hofmann preferred to search for what he believed to be the real in art, stretching it beyond the confines of a signature image. This exhibition offers a selection of his divergent poly-referential works spanning a period of 1944 through 1962.”

Don’t maintain a discrete distance from Ameringer McEnery Yohe this week – seek instead to close it.

“Suzanne Caporael” and “Hans Hofmann: Art Like Life is Real” run from March 15 to April 21 at Ameringer McEnery Yohe, 525 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212-445-0051, amy-nyc.com.

Franklin Einspruch is the art critic for The New York Sun. He blogs at Artblog.net.