London-born, Nicola Tyson attended art schools there - Chelsea and St Martins - in the 1980s. She has been based in New York pretty much ever since, and has achieved the difficult feat of establishing a place for herself in its capricious and difficult art world, while also building a presence on this side of the Atlantic, writes Aidan Dunne.

Reviewed

Nicola Tyson, Paintings and drawings, Douglas Hyde Gallery until Aug 4 01-6081116

Bathers Gary Coyle, AK Dolven, Justine Pearsall and Michael John Whelan, Temple Bar Gallery until July 23 01-6710073

This seems all the more striking given that she is primarily a painter and her painting is strongly underpinned by drawing: skills and activities substantially sidelined by the rise of the 1990s brand of slick neo-conceptualism, as exemplified in the work of the YBAs.

Tyson, though, emerged on the scene when there was again room for painting, so long as it was quirky, odd, whimsical: some variation of contemporary rococo. All of which continues to apply to the work in the Douglas Hyde Gallery exhibition. This may sound disparaging, and in many cases it would be, because painting that tries too hard to be quirky often becomes self-defeating. But Tyson is clearly a gifted draughtswoman, with a distinctive and persuasive imaginative vision.

Her work has long been linked to that of Francis Bacon and Hans Bellmer and you can see why. Her basic pictorial scheme, involving tersely painted, distorted and disjointed figures occupying stylised arenas, that might equally be domestic interiors or public spaces, surely engages in a direct dialogue with Bacon. Even her employment of painterly shortcuts recalls his way of redoing old masters in an abbreviated form, albeit a form that suggested incisive observational skills. The relevant Bellmer works are his fetishised composite dolls, an influence that was perhaps more evident in Tyson's earlier paintings, though the spirit of surrealism still looms large.

Each painting features an individual figure, and each is indeed a composite of sorts: a section of flesh, a few patches of differently patterned fabric garments, wildly disproportionate limbs, parts of two heads rather than one unified head, and so on. There is also some metamorphosis involved. In Self Portrait Trotting (self-portraits and fictionalised selves are recurrent concerns), the activity transforms the artist into what looks in many respects like a deer.

It is as though, trotting, she fleetingly visualises herself as a deer and then, free associating, thinks hunter-carcass-butchered, because the deer's side is surely bare to its ribs. This effect, of a mind inhabiting and visualising a body, a body usually in motion, in a fragmentary, multi-layered way, is apparent again and again. Some psychoanalytical theories posit the infant as only gradually putting together a series of fragmentary impressions and constructing an image of a coherent body, a coherent identity and coherent others. Add a cluster of fierce subjectivities, that is, a series of helplessly distorted, perhaps painful self-impressions (from mild to pathological) on the part of the subjects, and you begin to approach what comes across in Tyson's paintings.

To the oddity and awkwardness of embodiment one could perhaps add the arbitrary strangeness of desire, something for some reason more evident in the graphite drawings, in which there is the feeling of Tyson following more immediately the singular shifts and turns of an imagination let loose to roam wherever it will. The first things you encounter in the show are some of a series of monotype heads. She calls them Portrait Heads but apparently just one of them is a self-portrait and the rest are "fictions". They may be fictions but all of them have a compelling sense of presence, conveying the notion of a centralised being more directly, or more accessibly, let's say, than the complex figures in the larger paintings. There is a certain playfulness to these engaging, squashed, highly coloured forms, and that playfulness is there in everything she does, but there is, to varying degrees, also something malign about it. It is, in all, an edgy and convincing body of work and a show well worth seeing.

As is Bathers, a contemporary take on a traditional theme at Temple Bar Gallery. A recurrent and perhaps obsessive subject for Renoir, Cezanne and many other artists of the late 19th century, it was a way of licensing the depiction of nude figures in a landscape minus the rationale of mythology employed by artists in the classical tradition. Many contemporary artists have been drawn to have a go themselves, and this show gathers together the efforts of several.

You may be familiar with Gary Coyle's almost ritualised habit of not only swimming daily at the 40-Foot in Sandycove but recording in writing each excursion in Pooterish detail. His bather's photographs of the water from the water are tremendously atmospheric, and the show incorporates progressive instalments of his daily swimming diary. MJ Whelan's patient, real-time video is set in the same location. A fixed camera merely records the scene and chronicles the passage of hardy swimmers, male and female, into and out of the evidently freezing water. It's a slow, engrossing piece that conveys the out-of-time nature of the experience, familiarising us with a different rhythm.

Justine Pearsall's video, Clip Test, is a clever piece offering an underwater, upside-down view of a formation of synchronised swimmers. As with the description of swans as graceful poise above water and fierce paddling below, the human swimmers are both incredibly at home in the water, exceptionally skilled, and at times oddly awkward and undignified in their movements, with limbs askew, a mass of frantic movement producing serene images above.

The strangest piece is Norwegian artist AK Dolven's film Between the Morning and the Handbag. From the rear we see a naked, shaven-headed woman sitting at the edge of a pool. Beside this extraordinary curvilinear form, the elegant contoured swoop of shoulders to waist and twin hips accentuated by the bare scalp, sits a handbag. The handbag is in various ways a repository and symbol of aspects of female identity, culturally and biologically. Dolven explains nothing, but generates real tension with the juxtaposition. Will she jump, and if she does what does she gain or lose?