Margot Bergman and Nathalie Du Pasquier

Through Aug. 16. Anton Kern Gallery, 16 East 55th Street, Manhattan; 212-367-9663, antonkerngallery.com.

Each of these two solo shows catches up with an artist of a certain age whose latest work reminds us that art is ultimately not a young person’s game and that late success often feels the most solid.

Margot Bergman, now in her mid-80s, started exhibiting in Chicago, her hometown, in 1970. She didn’t make her New York debut until 2016, at the Anton Kern Gallery, where she is now showing again. Mrs. Bergman’s exclusive subject continues to be the human face, usually female, and the way emotions can ripple subtly across it. Her faces fill their canvases, whether large or small. Her style is ostensibly expressionist, loosely and sometimes sketchily painted but almost always given a weird specificity, thanks to an eye or mouth rendered with photo-realistic precision. These torque the faces and contribute to their tentative, changing expressions. Ms. Bergman’s newest pieces are photographs of the faces of dolls and puppets she has collected over the years; she adds more images then photographs them again. She seems to be living in her own private 1980s, combining neo-Expressionism and photo appropriation. More power to her.

Nathalie Du Pasquier was the youngest and also the only female member of Memphis, the high-spirited group that rocked the design world in the 1980s. She was known especially for assertively patterned textiles, but she has painted since the late 1980s. Now 62, she may be embarking on her best work. Her paintings benefit from casual presentation; oil on paper and cardboard pinned directly to the wall. Their colorful, geometric compositions wittily conjure flags, signs, building facades and furniture, especially bookshelves or cabinets. They owe something to the interwar Purist paintings of Amédée Ozenfant, Le Corbusier and Fernand Léger, as does Memphis. Ms. Du Pasquier’s painting might be described as Memphis flattened, which may ultimately be the best kind. ROBERTA SMITH