The Manifestation of Form” features artists who have evolved distinctive approaches to the human figure, ranging from exacting portraits to symbolic fantasy, at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street , in Chelsea , from June 1 through 21. (Reception: Thursday, June 7, from 6 to 8 pm.)
 Shirley Lu, formerly of Taiwan , now living and working in New York , paints portraits of women that convey an unusual emotional and psychological depth. Almost always, Lu's women are glamorous, elegantly dressed, suggesting the heroines of glitzy popular novels. However, the artist penetrates their sleek facades and captures something of the human vulnerability beneath the mask of makeup, as seen in her painting of a young Asian woman with dyed platinum blonde hair and an expression that is trying too hard to appear defiant. She resembles a modern version of “The White-Haired Demon” in an ancient Chinese myth about a beautiful young woman with pure white tresses who is possessed of evil powers. But the title of Lu's painting asks, “Is it Evil,  Or Is it a Wounded Soul?”
 Less ambiguous in meaning but equally effective is Lu's poignant painting “Foolishly Waiting,” in which the forlorn female subject, wearing a black silk slip and seen from behind, rests her head on her raised knees, apparently lost in a reverie of a lover who has jilted her.
 Sydnei Smith Jordan also employs the genre of the portrait to get at vital human issues, rather than to put a cheery face on her African-American subjects. Often, Jordan chooses a limited palette and utilizes severe cropping to infuse her compositions with drama, as seen in her painting “Jay-Z.” Here the famous rapper's face a brilliant shade of blue to symbolize emotional shading rather than reality, suggests the pensive mood of a public person caught in a rare moment of private introspection.
 Smith Jordan , whose biography informs that she survived a “tumultuous childhood” also invests the face of the determined-looking woman in another painting called “The Eye of the Beholder” with impressive grace and dignity by virtue of her empathetic vision.  
 In contrast to how both Lu and Smith Jordan subvert the superficial conventions of the posed portrait to unveil the naked human soul, two other artists subject the human visage and figure to radical alterations in order to evoke  meanings of a more symbolic kind:
 Nina G. Nahkala, who was born in the Republic of Georgia, grew up in five countries of the former Soviet Union, and now lives and works in Finland, employs pale
colors and softly diffused brushstrokes to evoke graceful, wraith-like female figures enveloped in luminous atmospheres suggestive of unearthly landscapes. The world that she evokes is a place of misty vistas and vast mystery, reminiscent of the rarefied realm of floating nymphs in Henri Fantin-Latour's “Daughters of the Rhine ” or the brilliantly-lit paradise of Philip Otto Runge's “Morning.” Like those great Symbolists, Nahkala envisions the idealized female figure as an emissary from an angelic world, and like theirs, her work inspires spiritual contemplation in the viewer.
 Born in Berlin , Ilona van Hoek is also a contemporary Symbolist, albeit with a somewhat darker vision. Depicting scenes that resonate with shadowy sturm und drang like a visual equivalent of the Wagnerian opera, her work has been aptly compared to that of Hieronymus Bosch. In her oil painting, “Nord,” for example, the disembodied  face of a stern, sage-like presence with a white handlebar mustache, the tips of which trail off into the clouds, is suspended above a grim nocturnal landscape where a sea serpent swims between craggy cliffs. In another painting called “Flaschengeist” van Hoek again reveals her fertile imagination with a formidable figure of a woman, appearing suspended like an apparition in mid-air, who could be a lapsed saint escaped from a religious icon .
 Like the other artists in this gem of a show, she has evolved a personal language with which to manifest the human spirit.