For the last decade, the Argentine artist Eneas Capalbo has staged small, tight retrospectives and unexpected revivals at his gallery, the National Exemplar, which until last year could be found in a stark TriBeCa basement. Turns out I wouldn’t have been able to see his latest show if I tried. Just as numerous galleries were relocating to his neighborhood, Mr. Capalbo quietly blew out of town for Iowa City, where the gallery’s second Midwest show features two quite different virtuosos of drawing.

One is Catherine Murphy, represented by three stringently observed half-length self-portraits in pencil from 1971 (and a fourth, from 2002, that depicts the artist’s kerchiefed head from behind). In each, she appears serious but not stern, and online the reproductions are hi-res enough to reveal the exact lines that define Ms. Murphy’s shirt or her hair part, the rubbing of her shadowed forehead, the darker hatches under her eyes. These drawings follow in a tradition, dating back to Rembrandt at least, of self-portraiture as vindication of the artist’s technical skill. Yet in the aftermath of modernism, Ms. Murphy treats skill differently; she makes observation itself the subject of scrutiny, and expresses a careful, even claustrophobic consciousness at work.

Three newer, similarly scaled drawings by Terry Winters depict white shapes, overlaid with contoured stripes or grids, which are set within fields of black — but, in the company of Ms. Murphy’s self-portraits, have the fullness of faces. Their wire-mesh lineaments recall the rendering software used by Hollywood studios to create 3D-animated characters — or, more worryingly, the scanning capabilities of government and corporate surveillants. The gallery’s online presentation includes several installation shots that reveal Ms. Murphy’s and Mr. Winters’s playing off each other, as well as off mirrored closets in the Iowa gallery, which appears to be the ground floor of a home. You could spend a long time looking at these portraits if this is where you were sheltered in place. JASON FARAGO