For a quarter-century, Stephen Haller Gallery has been home to refined abstraction. From its inception, the gallery’s reigning sensibility gravitated toward a seductive minimalism, one that retains some whisper of reference to lived experience. While its current roster includes a few nods to the tapped-out nag of our postmodern moment, the gallery remains largely committed to carefully crafted work that emphasizes the pleasures of surface texture and the virtues of design.

“Compendium” is a summer sampler of gallery artists and a foretaste of the fall season.The advantage of such a survey, like a chocolatier’s boxed assortment, is obvious. The disadvantage is that disparities in style and imagery distract from individual achievements.

The most satisfying works in the collection keep faith with the gallery’s signature aesthetic. First among these are paintings by Lloyd Martin and Johnnie Winona Ross, who complement each other in formal approach and emotional tone. Both are wedded to a sense of geometric order that defined decorative motifs and woven textiles long before Mondrian’s Neoplasticism came and went as the next new thing. Both artists call our attention back to pattern structures we see all the time without stopping to notice them. Here, they are not background but the heart of the work.

In his 2006 “Finestrae” series represented here, Mr. Martin, a Providencebased artist, divides his canvases into transparent rectangles with precise bands of color (in this instance, black). He leaves some areas open-ended, creating illusions of planar depth. Within these dominant structural lines, space is subdivided into smaller windows subtly distinguished from each other by surface manipulation and faint tonal changes.

The luminous geometries of Mr. Ross, who lives in New Mexico, suggest the pristine austerity of the Southwestern desert landscape. “Sand Bend Draw” (2006) and “Salt Creek Seeps” (2006) both refer to Texas locales. The first is a valley with intermittent streams that cross into flat prairie. The second is a geographic phenomenon whereby ground water seeps down the side of a desert gorge, leaching mineral oxides from soil that drips down the surface of the rock.

Mr. Ross schematizes the movement of coursing water by running delicate horizontal stripes across immaculate surfaces; each stripe is woven into a vertical series of pale striations colored in the bleached tints of sandy terrain, clay loams, and dry grass. Multiple layers of pigmented and burnished acrylic glaze create the translucent depth and low sheen characteristic of beeswax. Slow and fastidious, his method yields lustrous nuances that require close viewing.

Distilled landscape also provides structure to the work of Ron Ehrlich, who spent five years studying ceramics in Japan. Marvelous abstract painting appeared on Japanese ceramics centuries before the New York School found a use for it on canvas. Mr. Ehrlich refreshes the clichés of action painting with the downward gravitation of pearlescent and opaque glazes that suggest the surface of a raku tea bowl. The spirit of raku embraces the element of surprise; that gamble on intuition is saved from mere egoistic expression by evocations of the natural world.

The encaustic and wood structures of the Austrian-born Johannes Girardoni hold undeniable tactile appeal. These are works you want to touch, caress, maybe even smell. Part painting and part sculpture, they are constructed from found pieces of battered wood conjoined with a broad expanse of encaustic in a muted monochrome. Textures of old planking coexist beautifully with the irregularities of beeswax on panel.Two untitled works — one in the gallery proper, a second in the back room — here suggest shuttered windows. Mr. Girardoni’s evocative marriage of organic materials spurs recognition of the effects of time and weather on mortal life.

Larry Zox was given a retrospective at the Whitney in 1973 in hasty recognition of his 1960s color-field painting. Two of his three paintings here represent the hard-edged, spliced color fields that built his career. “Beach” (1964) copies precisely the stripes on a canvas beach chair, the kind families used to rent from boardwalk concessions at Jones Beach. The yellow-soaked “Weshcubb” (1993) relies on size (it is more than 6 feet high) to putty over what it lacks in structure. These works confirm my suspicion that color-field painting was little more than modestly appealing decoration gone uppity.

Nobu Fukui’s two collages, constructed entirely of comic book imagery, flaunt a kiddies-eating-chips sensibility. At first glance, both “Let’s Go Home” (2006) and “Bang” (2006) appear to have been made to attract downy-cheeked hedge-fund managers. It takes a moment to discern the ordered grid that disciplines the allover color distribution, making it cohere in crazy-quilt fashion.

At 8 feet square, Kathy Moss’s “Untitled #340” (2005) takes up more wall space than is necessary for this painterly, spare trio of dark alizarin seedpods suspended across a mottled, monochrome field. Ms. Moss’s imagery is beautifully balanced within the perimeters of the canvas, though she gains nothing significant by increasing the dimensions.Size only matters if you want if you want to be one of the boys, and gigantism was an affectation of the boys of yesterday.

Linda Stojak’s painting seems out of joint here. A roughly outlined female figure afloat on a single color is asked to carry an oversize canvas on no better grounds than nudity. A minimal concept, attenuated by acreage, places large demands on a painter’s hand. Ms. Moss’s seedpods perform the same task with greater élan and manual grace.

Until August 4 (542 W. 26th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-741-7777). Prices: $7,500–$60,000.