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Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, Still, Reinhardt, Motherwell The mid-twentieth century was an especially exciting and charged time in America’s history, artists using paint to express a world beyond the figurative, and the space that filled their subconscious minds was splayed out before beholders’ eyes. Young Peckham gallerist Hannah Barry is culling this romanticized era in London with her recently opened show “New Work, New York: Abstract Painting from America.” The title of the show even sounds anachronistic, in a charming way, and the works have a similar charmed quality.

For the show, Barry spruced up the gallery, located in an industrial park just behind the Peckham Rye overground station, adding full-size white walls (though still maintaining the raw ceiling and garage door of the spacious industrial space). Barry no doubt needed the added wall space for the 29 large-scale paintings by four very promising young abstract painters: Wyatt Kahn, Erik Lindman, Anton Zolotov, and Matteo Callegari.

The show is exciting and fresh, a promising outlook for contemporary painting. Some of the works — like Lindman’s serene color field paintings that are thoughtfully placed in one corner of the gallery, a simple gesture to accent the quiet yet powerful works — looked almost old, as one person commented in the opening night talk, referencing historical movements in American painting (namely Ab Ex).

Callegari’s rigorously marked and patterned works — acrylic, oil and brightly colored spray paint on canvas — recalled symbolic references (the letter “I,” for example, dominating an untitled work in the front room) and a technique largely influenced by early street art.

Anton Zolotov’s work is painting meets appropriation. If installation art were to creep on to the canvas, this would be the result — highly amusing and successful works composed of paint, fixative, and mixed media (a rabid wolf mask, plastic bags, a deconstructed Jesus memento visible only from its hollow inside). The works ask you to examine them carefully from all angles. I found myself peeking into the orifice of the gaping mask to see if perhaps there is something inside or if it was an endless abyss like a Lee Bontecou wall relief. They are highly engaging, at times soft and subtle, like the smaller Portrait of Joe that exists behind a plexiglass shield. This work is strong but coy, the most engaging of Zolotov’s paintings.

Finally, placed together as a triangular group behind the wall that divides the gallery space are three works by Brooklyn-based artist Wyatt Kahn. Essentially they are “black paintings,” composed of ink, charcoal, and silverpoint on canvas. But these “black paintings” are highly emotive and sensual — light and structural in a dark and amorphous guise. Titled Not Available (untitled centered shape perspectives), Not Available (vertical and horizontal perspective), and Not Available (triangular perspective) they are also eloquently named, as they are in fact unavailable. You gaze at the billowing and ephemeral blacks and charcoals overlaid with a sharp silver skeleton, and you can’t pinpoint why you feel both sad and elevated all at once. They ask you to stay but perplex you all the same. “An artwork is not a stable equation,” remarks Kahn in the catalogue, and a fact that he so beautifully makes apparent.

Since the opening of the gallery in 2008, Barry and her partner Sven Mündner have proven to have an acute eye for talent and thoughtful and engaging relationship with their stable of artists. The gallery is soon to expand to a second location on Bond Street, a small and classical two-room space, certainly a deviation from their current locale, but one that I’m confident will be used with a similarly adept and thoroughly engaging curatorial approach.