The Berlin-based abstract painter Frank Badur is something of an institution in Germany, but not so well known in America, despite a number of solo exhibitions across the country in the past decade.

This relative obscurity is in part due to the obdurate "purity" of his geometric painting, which usually presents one monochrome rectangle set into another to create a notched or bracketed optical field, one that doesn't appear to extend, so much as remain fixed to, the local boundaries of each stretched canvas. Over time, the attentive viewer can discern some slippage or indeterminacy in each figure/ground relationship, but time is in short supply for much of the New York contemporary-art audience.

Meditative Minimalism is well established in the visual cultures of Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia, particularly in relation to architecture. The contingent temporality and characterless scale of much of what gets built in America has largely thwarted a symbiotic relationship between painting and site, and it is this potential relationship that Badur's paintings invoke.

Badur's recent exhibition at Margaret Thatcher was largely composed of drawings and two fairly small paintings; the latter emphasized their architectural affinities by suggesting exterior views of rectangular buildings in a buttery orange and red light. Each painting, one vertical and the other horizontal, cropped off a large rectangle with a band of red along the top and to one side. More than in most of Badur's previous paintings, it is possible to look into the layered creation of each color plane through the patient development of the surface.

In his earlier paintings the surface is often as developed as it is here, but the color nevertheless reads flatter. The lighter red and orange rectangles in the current paintings draw light and tone from their abutting colors and seem seductively equivocal in their own composure, arrived at by attentive mixing and careful adjustment of value and temperature in order to share a light with their neighboring color. Donald Judd, in his early painting days, would have loved these reds.

The black-and-white drawings extend this mix of vulnerability and monumentality by juxtaposing a tightly constructed regular grid with black or silvery gray monochrome passages of dense graphic workmanship. On many, if not most, occasions, each unit of a grid as densely ruled as graph paper is filled with a tiny cruciform mark that, when viewed from the middle distance, visually disperses into a granular fog, simultaneously softening the conceptual surface of the drawing and adding a kind of pliant crystalline effect that made me think of rice paper.

Badur has always made work on paper, but it often pursues much the same color concerns as his paintings. It's rare to find an extensive body of his black-and-white drawings together in one place. They provide insight into his painting process by making clear his interest in the different weight and densities in the surfaces of his shapes as they bite into each other. Like the best Minimalist art of an earlier generation, Badur's compositions reveal themselves, with contemplation, to be active, sensual and emotional.