Shown in the United Kingdom for the first time, the nine works collected in “Fury: Painting after The War” serve as a dark corrective to Hans Hofmann’s perceived image: the colorist whose Tetris-like blocks of melting intensity heralded him as a key figure of Abstract Expressionism. (His drip paintings prefigured Jackson Pollock’s.)

Here, Hofmann emerges as an artist of unreconciled energies. Born in Germany in 1880, he studied art in Munich before moving in 1904 to Paris, where he lived for the next decade. In the 1930s, Hofmann landed in New York, via the vitamin-infused climes of California.

Painting, one paints oneself into the world. Every mark, motion, or gesture is, in a sense, an extension of whomever had the audacity to make it. But such acts can be a cruel burden, for while painters are afforded the luxury of limitless reinvention, their painted doubles have a stubborn tendency to remain fixed. Painting oneself into the world, one paints an image that holds.

Ella Kruglyanskaya, by contrast, is painting herself out—or at least painting out the approximation of herself that has taken shape throughout her career. The Latvian-born, Los Angeles–based artist is known primarily for

Piecework refers to labor paid according to the number of items produced rather than the amount of time spent on the job. Often associated with the ruthless economic exploitation of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, this system saw entire families gathered at home sewing garments or packing fruit, united in the desperate attempt to make ends meet. Piecework is sadly making a comeback—thanks to its versatility in allowing employers to get around minimum-wage and other labor laws—as dramatized recently on-screen by a family of Seoul basement dwellers frantically folding pizza boxes to