One of the show's loveliest pictures is a small, densely worked wood engraving made in 1943 by Amador Lugo, which depicts a bucolic landscape with houses and has barely a trace of ideological tendentiousness.
All the paintings in this astutely selected show share the abstracted image of one or more bust-length male heads densely worked in thick black paint.
And, perhaps most important, her paintings and sculptures, densely wrought and impatient of polish, have a sense of conviction that only art produced by a real laying on of hands can convey.
But the top part is dark and densely worked, depicting a female head on a pedestal draped with a shawl, the top of an easel and closely hatched stonework.
Vasilij Romanenkov's densely worked architectural drawings have a haunting, otherworldly air.
Rough-edged shapes, densely worked surfaces and a visionary effect are evident in drawings that bring to mind Bill Jensen's early work.
People might call the kind of drawings that Mr. Frost makes obsessive, but the effect of his small, quirky, densely worked abstractions on paper is more of meditative concentration than pathological repetition.
There were similar opportunities for violas and cellos in Mr. Adès's piece, a quickly sketched but densely worked portrait of Brahms, a cautious embrace, coming close in many particulars without quite quoting.
Known until now for his densely worked paintings of goofy cartoon imagery, Christian Schumann has taken a surprising turn to abstraction.
Murky and densely worked with erasers as well as graphite, they depict barely decipherable symbolic images of things like an angel, bursts of light and mystical signs.