The sculptural pleasures of Rachel Feinstein’s feisty show at the Marianne Boesky Gallery (her third with this dealer) border on the boisterous, the raucous even, but hardly live up to the notoriety that surrounds this artist’s name. In magazine profiles, Ms. Feinstein is celebrated as an enfant terrible of the art scene, and critics emphasize her citations of diverse styles.

Her new sculptures depict such items as an 18th-century carriage in a droopy state of deconstruction and a pair of frolicking satyrs, forms which, in terms of periodicity, faintly echo the rococo portraits on mirrors she presented in a 2005 paintings show. These latter, however, were but tamely grotesque in comparison to the caricature — of human features and historic styles alike — offered, for instance, by her husband John Currin. Ms. Feinstein, one feels, was always an iconoclast more by association than by her own actions.

What is fair to say — on the basis of the richly diverse half-dozen pieces on display here, all from 2008 — is that the sculptor is a “material girl.” She has fun with textures and surfaces, as do her forms themselves, reveling as they do in extremes of rough and smooth, shiny and matte, floppy and hard-edged.

“Satyrs” presents a goofy pair stepping forward as balletically as can be expected of such louchely abstracted creatures. Recalling Max Ernst’s personages, Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures, Franz West’s biomorphs, and Barry Flanagan’s hares, they exude flamboyance. They are cast from elastic, pliable materials such as nylon and polyester, and manage to retain, in their hard, plaster-like finish, their sense of underlying looseness. In “Sarcophagus,” similar figures find themselves wallowing in concrete as if embroiled in a mud bath, the lithe, limb-like forms coated in rough texture.

“Alice” is a figure in flat, cutout wood, a dark, handsome plywood on a laminate pedestal. The technique recalls Picasso’s metal cutouts of the 1940s, and the interlocking figure works of William King from the 1960s. Like these artists, she manages to combine earthy wit and sculptural energy. A hand punched in negative through the figure’s chest belongs by implication to someone else, recalling those saucy posters in which a cheeky worker’s oily handprint is impressed somewhere upon an unsuspecting lady’s person.

The tour de force of this show, and the artist’s most decisive departure from past forms, is a sprawling wall structure in shiny copper plate and wood scaffolding, “Army of God.” Based on 15th-century tapestries of St. Michael vanquishing Lucifer, the jagged flame- or wing-like edges in reflective polished copper visually set the sculpture afire.

What is particularly sustaining about this piece is the sophisticated way it mixes up speeds of assembly and spectacle alike. It feels improvised, and yet is intricately crafted, especially in the way the writhing metal meets up with the supporting wood. Scorching itself onto consciousness, this literally flashy work is also, contradictorily, a slow read, which makes for sculpturally satisfying tension.

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A pendant to Ms. Feinstein’s rococo theatricality can be found in the baroque sensibility of Jeanne Silverthorne and her bizarrely crafted, at once poignant and absurd sculptures. Her latest show at the McKee Gallery, worked in rubber, her trademark material, takes her studio surroundings as her motif. The result — which can be considered a portrait of the artist as much as essays in still life — is to soften the quotidian in a weird, disconcerting way.

The banal becomes otherworldly as objects such as shipping crates, a trash can filled with broken lightbulbs, wooden picture frames, wires, cables, electrical outlets all begin to wobble and sweat in their rubberized state. The bulbs, and so many objects in this show, attract flies, which one is to gather are ubiquitous, if unwelcome, guests in her SoHo loft.

This is a busy show, with a lot being offered. There is a wall of 45 similarly framed works, 33 of them photographs of her studio, the remainder miniature videos from which these stills were taken. There are several of her familiar rubber-framed relief sculptures. And “Pneuma Machine” (2005) is a sculptural installation experienced in a darkened room in which the objects, which include vibrating motors on a table, an abundance of tubing between them, and an overhanging lightbulb and shade, are coated in phosphorescent pigment, so that they glow — ominously or ethereally, depending on the sensibility of the viewer.

This is also a show of mixed aesthetic emotions, as befits a portrait of a studio that seeks to represent all that would indeed be found in such a place, including moods as surely as materials, equipment, and the artist herself. “Untitled (Bad Ideas)” (2007) is an example of a kind of visual/verbal wit, as a bin overflows with discarded lightbulbs, the latter being almost cartoonlike signifiers of ideas. In contrast to this lighthearted humor is the heavy-handed conceptualism with which the artist deals with the humors, as such, of “DNA Candelabra (showing the beginning genetic sequence for depression, anxiety, addiction, anger and panic) on rubber crate” (2007). The DNA letters are impressed into the candles.

Rubberized, her forms are at once icky and compelling, inspiring simultaneously a compulsion to touch and revulsion from doing so. There is an element of the theater of the absurd as commonplace objects become exotic or metamorphose into an unconscious, dreamlike realm.

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Gedi Sibony’s aesthetic is sparse without being severe. To the baroque and rococo of these other sculptors, his sensibility is almost neoclassical, revisiting minimal art — but minimally.

He favors slight but decisive interventions in humble building-trade materials — the show, at Greene Naftali, which fills the sprawling loft premises of this high-ceilinged warehouse gallery, favors materials such as leftover cuts of carpet, pipes, foamcore, blinds, curtains, and so forth. The show plays a joke on this postindustrial space by including the kinds of stuff that might easily have been left here by workers. The removal, by the artist, of any track lighting reinforces the pre-gallery raw state of the space.

His vocabulary directly recalls Arte Povera, and indirectly many other moments in Modern and Postmodern sculpture (Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Tuttle), but with a minimum of fuss: There is neither tragedy nor humor in the materials. There is no heavy-handed ecological agenda in recycling. There is little sense of the materials coming with baggage, of angst or attitude in the materials’ desuetude. On the contrary, the materials have transparency, and his motives for choosing them seem formally and emotionally clean.

What at times tilts his interventions toward preciousness is his penchant for poetic-absurdist titles: “Its Origins Justify its Oranges” (2008) is a rectangular wooden frame with bowed diagonal appendages and colored lights; “The Is should be capitalized” (2008) (a title where it only slowly dawns on one that “Is” refers to the plural of the letter “I,” not the participle of the verb to be) is an arrangement of hollow-core door, paper, and staples against the edge of a corner of wall.

Generally, however, this is sculpture that hovers between intentionality and nonchalance: The very act of remaining in that gray area is what defines his artistry.

Feinstein until May 23 (509 W. 24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-680-9889).

Silverthorne until June 13 (745 Fifth Ave., between 57th and 58th streets, 212-688-5951).

Sibony until May 24 (508 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-463-7770).