The remarkable coming together of painting and sculpture in the career of Merrill Wagner carries a steady and clear-cut certainty that reveals itself in an exhibition currently on view at the uptown Zwirner Gallery. As a predecessor to Wagner’s eventual use of grid-based seriations, her early engagement with abstraction and minimalism reveals what these abstract compositions may have been striving to achieve: an exploration of the relationship between nature and art, chance and process. In a parallel mode, this exhibition demonstrates beyond a doubt that Wagner’s focus on materiality has continued to expand and move forward since the early seventies.