Agnes Denes is perhaps best known for planting a two-acre wheat field at the southern tip of Manhattan in 1982, during the development of Battery Park City. An iconic photograph of the artist—waist-deep in golden sheaves, skyscrapers looming nearby—appears in many surveys of environmental art. But this work, of seemingly simple generosity (Denes harvested one thousand pounds of the crop that August and planted it around the globe), was pointedly titled Wheatfield—A Confrontation, and can be understood as one of the first occasions on which Denes worked on a scale large enough and in a public location central enough to suit her outsize ambition. The intervention represented, in the artist's words, nothing less than "food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger, and ecological concerns."

By the time the Public Art Fund commissioned Wheatfield, Denes had been creating drawings that married Conceptual art to philosophy, mathematics, and science for fifteen years. Two dozen drawings, alongside documentation of Wheatfield and a more recent, long-term environmental intervention in Finland, were included in this exhibition, the artist's first solo show in New York since a touring retrospective of her public projects arrived at the Chelsea Art Museum in late 2004. Dating from 1970 to 2006 but primarily created in the late '70s and in 1980, the works on paper often feature abstract shapes centered on white or graph-paper grounds. Their precision betrays a fiercely analytic mind and a steady hand; their refinement highlights a conventional wisdom in the non-artistic disciplines her practice engages: The best solution to a problem is the most elegant.

Arguably the loveliest drawing in the exhibition was Colorburst: The Egg (longitude lines), 1980, in which variously hued ribbons of watercolor nestle side by side, bounded by meridian lines—drawn in ink on an overlaid sheet of clear acetate—that demarcate an egg shape not much larger than those found at a grocery store. The equipoise between seemingly freeform and rule-bound marks is splendid; the delicate colors worthy of Faberge. Yet Denes would disdain a purely formal interpretation of her drawings, even when they succeed so well at pleasing the eye. For example, other, similarly shaped drawings—not included here—are meant as studies for utopian, self-contained urban dwellings.

One series, "Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space: Map Projections," predominated. In these drawings, which project mathematical forms—the cube, the dodecahedron, the torus—onto representations of the world, Conceptual rigor rubs against the myriad imperfections of the spatial environment we inhabit, and the friction highlights the contingency of how we understand space. These playfully idiosyncratic maps, Denes's unrelenting seriousness notwithstanding, exhibit a dry humor: Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space: Map Projections-The Hot Dog, 1976, for example, shows an Earth that has improbably morphed into the shape of a hot dog.

Perhaps entering the territory of so many other disciplines made Denes's position somewhat marginal in the contemporary art world. Likewise her shift, in the early '80s, into the realm of public, environmental art can be said to have uprooted Denes from the gallery system that feeds mainstream art institutions. Yet without impinging upon other artists' signature styles, the works exhibited here furthered many artistic concerns prevalent in the late '70s; Denes was entirely of her moment. Given that her current concern with the environment is one we all share (or ought to), the exhibition left one hoping her will soon re-enter mainstream circulation.