Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel

Nicola Tyson may have a signature style, but over the past decade she has pushed and tweaked it so that each new phase is richer and more interesting than the last. There has always been, in her paintings, the (mainly solitary) female figure--an elegant grotesque with morphing body parts sheathed in fetishistic clothing, or nude, placed with conspicuity against flatly painted one- or two-color backgrounds. But where in the mid-'90s there was a stiffness about the figures, by 2005, the date of the works in her recent show, they have grown more supple, having comfortably matured into their polymorphism.

In 1997-98, Tyson broke out of her tentativeness via quick gestural drawings, which she created in profusion (they were the subject that year of an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich), exploiting a sinuous line to imbue each of her myriad beings with an astonishing specificity of moods. That line was incorporated into the paintings, breathing into them a delicate vigor. In 2003, Tyson showed a large group of portrait heads in monotype, a medium that, though indirect, is best executed rapidly and spontaneously. Pushing her a step away from Bacon and Bellmer, to whom she was most frequently compared, these prints, with their loose and emphatic application of a wide array of colors, brought to her work an expressionist cast and attendant immediacy.

Tyson follows up on that tendency in the 2005 paintings, of which a dozen or so were on view at Petzel. Here she wields her brush even more freely, modulating her colors and allowing them to peek through layers in what were previously impenetrable grounds. The work seems to open to other spatial and psychic dimensions, rescuing the figures from what sometimes felt like suffocation--though that was not an uninteresting quality. In Self-Portrait: Signature Piece, a red-headed figure who frequently stands for the artist seems to stroll along with relative insouciance, swinging her prosthetic arms, her simultaneously front-and-back posture causing no discomfort as she treads on the letters "nnt," perhaps a stuttering signature. Her garb consists of a gown of red striations over blood red, and a sky blue undergarment; the ground is an icier blue and the sky violet.

One feels that the figures have been liberated through color, from the rotund grande dame of Full Length, with her busy gown seemingly patched together from colorful scraps and ribbons, to the character in Pointers who, swayback to us, shoots a green udder from her belly toward the heavens. The grande dame smiles; the udder-girl is radiant. Indeed, throughout the work, we sense Tyson enjoying herself in a new way, as if amused by these bizarre emanations. Not that they can't still cause discomfort. The shame of Nude, with her single, pendulous breast and abashed, monkeylike face, is palpable, but the lemon-yellow of the background sweetens things, giving the painting an ironic delectability.

Though Tyson has shown landscapes before, the three in this exhibition were the first I'd seen. A pair of pink ruminants graze in a somber meadow, barren but for a muddy pond in the foreground and, rising before the creatures, a tall, fiery pillar, perhaps a tree stump lit by the sun (Landscape with Two Animals). Two giant multicolored rocks, shaped something like a head and a fist, preside over a turquoise and yellow terrain (Landscape Contemplating Itself). More celebratory, Stars and Waves shows a graceful celestial eruption in a scene painted in close-valued shades of purple, blue, gray and blood red. It is as if the transformative propensities of Tyson's girls have spilled into nature, where there are many new possibilities for everything to become Other.

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