NEW YORK—Bettina Sellmann, who was born in Munich and lives and works in Brooklyn, is known for creating what she calls “see-through versions” of Old Master paintings. In early works this might mean a classically staged portrait gone translucent and ethereal, the sitter’s edges lost in a waft of soft color, the subject looking ghostly, lost in space, there and not there.

But in her latest show of watercolors — her fourth at Derek Eller Gallery in Chelsea, through January 10 — Sellman presents work that is at once bolder, more lyrical, and more abstract. In these intense, richly colored paintings there’s a sense that two opposing forces are at work: one concerned with beauty and lyricism, and one seething with violence.

While the airy Your Skin gently conjures two nuzzling lovers from what appears to be a swirl of plum-gray smoke, Dogdreams features a prone figure caught in an explosion of red. The Sexual Phantasies of Women shows a dark, faceless character bent over a topless female figure, her arms held tight behind her and her skirt trailing off in a wash of blood red. And My Killer and Me, a spare composition in browns and black, shows a hated figure kneeling over someone awkwardly sprawled on the ground, the lines devolving into scrawls, the paint left to drip, and the word “love” inscribed in the middle of it all.

Sellmann begins each work with a theme, and key to this exhibition, titled “Taina . cosmogeny . make your own paper dragon,” she says, is exploring individuals' place in the world and human motivations — whether internal forces like sex drive and the Freudian death wish, or external ones like religion and war. But when it comes to the painting process itself, she aims to remove all intellectualizing and work from a deeper, more psychic space, she says, and is often shocked by the product.

Some of the results appear “really strange” to her at first, and it’s true that the imagery — like its source material — can be dark. In At Church, for example, which interprets a scene from Faust in which the ingénue, Gretchen, seeks refuge from an evil spirit, we see a watery blue figure, nearly obliterated by an inky cloud, moving toward a distant, solid structure. It’s an apt metaphor for Sellmann’s practice.

Here are Sellmann’s recommendations for this weekend in New York:

1. Tomma Abts at David Zwirner, through December 23

“Tomma Abts’s paintings keep me puzzled. These abstract paintings don’t care for the history of abstract painting. The paint here is used only and directly for her personal aim. There is no leftover. They are complete, closed, independent. They are not abstract in how each seems to be a direct rendering of consciousness. Every single one is its own precise, specific space/event/story. This specificity is the most dazzling. They are so sure of themselves. But what are they? I don’t get them. It’s awesome.”

2. Albert York at T&Sn’Kreps, through December 20

“Sure, the questions that are being raised by putting these kinds of paintings in a Chelsea gallery are ... interesting. Because it’s not an intellectual pastime: These paintings really are slightly off. A slight disjunction that I might have overlooked uptown. Very subtle, very strange. Without the frames they would be even more bare. Most of all: so calming for the nervous system. They are not trying. This is not someone who wants to be hip. But this show creates an opening.”

3. FUNNY NOT FUNNY at Bellwether Gallery, through January 17, 2009

“So I thought some of these pieces were really cool, among them David Shrigley’s gruesome reality-satire pieces like the one with the guy who ‘is having a real fit,’ or the one with ‘resisting the temptation to dig her up and fuck her.’ Tami Ben-Tor’s ridiculous enumerating of hollow sounding phrases from emails — it’s the attitude that makes them funny, there is no banal irony. Also, Kirsten Stoltmann’s ‘I was thinking it doesn’t need to be that difficult’ collage of female genitalia from flowers (how good-embarrassing!) and millions-of-flower-stickers complications: Yeah, that would be nice.”