The Marian Goodman Gallery’s “Freeing the Line” is a smart, attractive exhibition that gathers two disparate bodies of work and connects them — like two dots into a line — in a single narrative. An offshoot of Minimalist sculpture known as “drawings without paper” is linked to contemporary installations whose formal and conceptual freedom, the show suggests, is only possible because of the pioneering example of the earlier work.

Richard Tuttle’s “Untitled” (1972) floats six lengths of wire, each running between two nails, about an inch from the gallery wall. Dark lines against a white background, the work may resemble a pencil sketch, but it is less an homage than a subversion of the conventions of drawing. By granting the line its own body, “Untitled” effectively liberates it from dependence on the support of the page.

From Mr. Tuttle’s simple rendering, it is only a short step to the more elaborate wire drawings of Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt) and Karel Malich, many of which hang from the ceiling like mobiles.While Gego’s works tend to be ordered and geometric — her “Sphere No. 7” (1977) is something like a miniature geodesic dome made of stainless steel wire — Mr. Malich’s are organic and free-flowing. His dangling abstractions of wire and string are characterized by fluid curves and perfectly straight lines, as if some master draftsman has discovered how to sketch on air.

The show also highlights several contemporary artists who, a generation later, take the liberated line for granted in their more narrative and overtly conceptual work. Ranjani Shettar’s “Vasanta (Spring/Transition)” (2005) and Monika Grzymala’s “Transition” (2006), two impressive installations, change color and size as they twist and wrap through the gallery. The latter uses strips of black and white masking tape to tell a story of darkness and light, chaos and order. On one end, the piece is a messy tangle of black tape that spills onto the floor, loops around itself, fails to hug a corner, and generally looks like a ball of yarn that has lost its center. But then the black tape gives way to white, and suddenly there are even, perfectly horizontal lines stacked one atop the other, forming a disciplined, solid mass that bleeds into the white gallery wall.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s “Room of Volume of Air” (1993–2004) contains 13 discrete sculptures, each a rectangular cube — its edges made of iron, copper, or wood, its sides nothing but empty space — that is overlaid by long, thin found materials such as wooden sticks, metal rods, and strands of ribbon. In the context of the show, the empty box reads as a three-dimensional version of blank paper, and the found materials, whether solid wood or flimsy ribbon, signify the first drawn marks on the page.

But even as it embodies the very themes of “Freeing the Line,” Ms. Tuerlinckx’s art also alludes to numerous historical antecedents that have nothing to do with the paperless “drawings” of Gego, Malich, and Tuttle. As if anticipating this criticism, the curator, Catherine De Zegher, has added nuance to her show’s tidy two-chapter narrative by including works on paper and canvas by Eva Hesse (from the 1960s) and Julie Mehretu (from the past several years) and mixing a few well-chosen contemporary examples among the 1970s pieces, and vice versa. In the end, this clever exhibition offers its straight story as a sort of elegant abstraction — itself a liberated line — while simultaneously sketching a truer portrait of art-historical development, one that is messy and chaotic, full of hatch marks, blurs, overlaps, and erasures.

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If you think too hard about the meaning of “Dereconstruction,” the title of the Gladstone Gallery’s summer exhibition, your head may explode. But give yourself the time to look closely at the work on display, and this convoluted concept begins to make intuitive sense.

Take, for example, Judith Scott’s “Blue Hoses” (2004), a large bundle (27 inches by 14 inches by 25 inches) of variously colored yarn, with a few bends of plastic hose poking out between the cracks. At first, this sculpture seems like either a mass of untouched materials begging to be shaped or a tangle of mostly superfluous yarn that must be unwoven to reveal the essential hose at its core. Yet, between these constructive and deconstructive tendencies lies a third possibility — that the work represents nothing more than its present state. Hovering between completeness and incompleteness, teetering on the brink of chaos, it nonetheless evinces calm and order, and is balanced and free of tension.

If this stable, in-between state is what is meant by “dereconstruction,” other works in the show suggest that its equilibrium can be extremely delicate. Alexandra Bircken’s “Zusammenhang” (2006) is an exquisite woven installation of wool, wood, leather, stone, and dried plants. Its central frame is suspended in midair, perfectly restful, but one feels that the removal of any component, even the tiniest stitch of yarn, would disrupt its fragile harmony and undo the entire piece.

A similar sense of precariousness hovers over Markus Amm’s “Untitled” (2006), a multipart work comprising five sheets of photographic paper with abstract renderings in oil paint and darkroom chemicals. Each is a different design of black lines, white spaces, and the occasional patch of color — a combination of elements that recalls classical Mondrian. But whereas Mondrian was a master of premeditation, order, and geometry, in these works lines are not drawn to completion, brushstrokes are visible, borders are inexact, and the overall formal structure feels uncertain. While Mr. Amm’s creations are neither haphazard nor undisciplined, they feel perilously fragile, a misplaced line away from total disorder.

Compared to Ms. Bircken’s and Mr. Amm’s tentative assertions of form and control, Lucas Samaras’s “Reconstruction #41” (1978), which was made a generation earlier at the very height of deconstruction, is decidedly more confident. A patchwork quilt of sewn fabrics with abstract design, it presents a cacophony of dots, lines, and swirls that finds organization in the repetition of elements and the very fact of its stitched-togetherness.

It is possible to draw a line connecting the works of Ms. Scott, Ms. Bircken and Mr. Amm, and Mr. Samaras such that each represents a discrete equilibrium on the path to “completed” form. And yet the similarities between these three states — each embodying the paradoxical notion of fragile stability — outweigh the differences. “Dereconstruction” does not represent a movement, and the pieces gathered here are too diverse in intention and technique even to suggest a tendency. But collectively they display curator Matthew Higgs’s cautiously optimistic assessment of art in the era after deconstruction, signaling that the noble tradition of creating order from chaos remains alive and well.

“Freeing the Line” until August 26 (24 W. 57th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-581-5187). “Dereconstruction” until August 18 (515 W.24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-206-9300).