With the mushroom-hunting season in full flush, the show "Mushrooms and Hearts" by Monika Abbott, a Czech émigrée artist living in Connecticut, is a timely and resonant exploration of a subject that is practically an obsession in her homeland.

Abbott has chosen this fascinating and peculiar organism that is neither animal, mineral nor vegetable as her first subject in a planned series on investigations into matter. The project, titled "Series Matter I — Mushrooms" debuted in the Bronx, New York, in 2004, and it is on view through the end of the month in the basement space of Galerie Mánes. The oil paintings on transparent Mylar, handmade paper and wood are organic, meditative and often mesmerizing, their palette beautiful and inviting in tones of pinks or greenish-grays.

Taken as a whole, the body of work is created with an intricacy of form that reflects the richness of the metaphors associated with the subject matter. Tangles of filaments contained within larger organic forms are like the mycelium hidden beneath the surface that sends up fruit bodies when conditions are just right. Then there's the phenomenon of symbiosis that is an essential part of a mushroom's existence — they could not develop and survive except in association with the roots of their host plants.

Further subtleties of meaning are to be found in the title of part of the mushroom series: Russula variegata. This scientific-sounding name is an imaginary one — to date no particular type of Russula mushroom has been thus classified — but incisively speaks about the complicated issues of identification and identity. The family of Russula mushrooms is vast, and its members are maddeningly variable, making them notoriously hard to identify with certainty; the Latin term variegata amplifies the sense of heterogeneity at which the artist seems to be aiming.

Like Rorschach inkblots or clouds, most of the works in the show seem to conceal various motifs within. Paintings on Mylar from the "Mushrooms" series are suggestive of fossils, life in the process of formation, mandalas or the central nervous system. Configurations of mushrooms evoke the progression of life from embryo to maturity, or the eternal cycle of the seasons.

In one of the paintings from this series, a section of the bigger shape coalesces neatly into the silhouette of a bird — a seemingly serendipitous appearance that the artist chose to embrace rather than reject. One of the simplest forms in this series is also among the most lyrical, and at the same time most easily recognizable, as a mushroom cap. It is an outward-radiating flow of wavy lines that appear to have been made with the intimate touch of the artist's fingers.

A gorgeous group of six "Notes" from 2003 to '04 is made using mushroom spores. Microscopic but enormously resilient (under the right conditions, some spores can lie dormant for decades and then begin to grow), the spore formations, combined with watercolors and gouache on a background of lush black handmade paper, look like photograms. In patches ranging from soft gray to brilliant white against black, accented with a color resembling chemical rust, the ghostly circular shapes are little studies of light, as well as an essay on decomposition and material absence.

A further set of "Notes," from 2003 to '05, consists of arrangements of gilled mushroom caps on handmade paper unevenly saturated with gold, russet, apricot or plum dye. From a distance, they resemble the ornate, mosaic-like garments in paintings by Gustav Klimt. But they additionally evoke particular forms — a woman's torso, the moon rising over a valley.

Most mushrooms of the family Russula are "cosmopolitan" — that is, able to achieve symbiosis with different species of trees or shrubs — while others are strictly associated with one particular plant species. In this compelling body of work, Abbott invites us to consider issues of identity as well as community and the concept of home.