NEW YORK—For several years early in this decade, the young New York– and New Haven–based painter Megan Craig worked mostly from architecture, creating casually abstracted, people-less cityscapes as seen from far-off vantage points. Echoes of these early explorations, with their stacks of horizontal planes and upright rectilinear forms, can be seen in All Lit Up (2006), one of the earliest paintings in Craig’s new show at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, titled “Lines of Flight” and on view through January 10. But for the most part, while space remains a primary concern for the artist, she has come to approach it in more indirect ways.

In a 2007 series of works based on fragments of Vuillard paintings, the shapes of the city are transposed onto still lifes and domestic interiors. Elsewhere, in paintings like Wall (2007), right angles have given way to curves, and urban forms to more organic ones. Finally, in works like Big Time and Surprise Party (both 2008), the concept of space itself is abstracted. If once Craig was a painter of buildings, bridges, rooftops, and streets, here she depicts openings and closings, cramped space and welcoming space. Instead of permanent structures, her focus is on something akin to visceral states.

This loosening of subject matter is just one way in which this new work represents a departure, and an opening up, for the artist. “My newest work is more visceral. I’m painting but not cleaning, no longer covering my tracks,” Craig told ARTINFO recently, speaking about her bolder, looser brushwork, especially evident in Surprise Party.

And then there are her colors. The artist, who is also a professor of philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook, recently taught a course on Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Color, and she says that her newest work represents the first time her teaching and painting have overlapped. “Color is often described as a secondary quality,” she says, momentarily lapsing into philosophy-speak. “But that seems wrong. As a painter, I think about color foremost.”

In this recalibrated metaphysics, color is central to the nature of reality rather than an aspect of our perception of it. Patches of color, and often surprising ones (you’ll find giant swaths of yellow and pink and peaches both bold and subdued), shape her compositions, generating warmth and coolness and creating areas of sharpness and softness. More and more in Craig’s work, color is not an afterthought but the thought itself.

“Mixing colors seems to be the essence of painting. They all act differently, dry differently. That’s what I find exciting and unresolved about painting.”

Here are Craig’s picks for the weekend in New York.

1. Josephine Halvorson at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., through January 10

"This was a surprise discovery while trudging through the snow on West 22nd street. I was drawn in by the bright orange embers in Hot Coals. Halvorson has nine modest-size paintings hanging in the intimate west gallery. Oil on linen and the size of a briefcase, each one depicts mundane objects: crumbs, a dirty window, a stack of photo albums. The paintings have an honest, loving touch, and as I acclimated to Halvorson’s palette of muted mauves, gray, olive, and egg white, I realized that these are all paintings of traces — remains of a day. The ashy filth of Fireplace Farm, the expressionist splatters of Dirty Window, and the bizarre, vaguely menacing machines in Meter reference Rembrandt, de Kooning, and Guston. It’s a painter’s show — not pretty but haunting and beautifully strange."

2. Dana Hoey: Experiments in Primitive Living at Friedrich Pretzel Gallery, through January 24

"There seems to be a lot of cataclysmic, end-of-the-world art right now. Hoey’s show of photographs envisions multiple catastrophes: a world consumed by ash, ice, heat, and flood. Her photographs range in scale and scope from the epic, parched fields of Ayler — a stunning mountain of golden grass that looks like the humped back of a prehistoric animal — to the close-range repeating pattern of north-pointing arrows in Compasses. The show made me think about time travel, the Weather Channel, science fiction, September 11th, old age, loneliness, and nature’s incomprehensible resilience. What’s so weird and wonderful about these photographs is how inhabitable and human they feel. Hoey’s frozen, ash-covered worlds are still warm and inviting — in part because of her genius for doling out color in just the right temperature and dose. Bugs, bodies, mushrooms, gadgets, an Amaryllis wilting amid gray weeds: every one of Hoey’s disasters kindles a quiet heroism and a visceral reminder of the elemental."