Variety is inherent in prints, which can be abstract, realistic, expressive or whatever an artist wishes. That endless diversity flavors two elegant exhibitions of contemporary images now on view in the Twin Cities.

"The Prints of Sean Scully" at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts through May 4 is a virtuoso display of abstractions created via woodcut, lithography, etching, aquatint and a passel of more arcane printmaking techniques. In St. Paul the College of Visual Arts is presenting, through April 5, a selection of recent prints, again mostly abstract, by 16 international artists.

The coincidental appearance of two top-quality print exhibits is a fine opportunity to renew acquaintance with various media in anticipation of the Minneapolis Print and Drawing Fair. The institute's annual show and sale, to be held April 26-27, brings 10 prominent print dealers to the museum, selling everything from Old Master prints by Dürer, Rembrandt and Goya to contemporary work by Wayne Thiebauld and Gerhard Richter.

'Prints of Sean Scully' Few artists wring as much psychological nuance and vivacity from such a limited range of forms as Scully, an Irish-born painter, photographer and printmaker who now lives in the United States. Give him a line and he runs with it. But only up, down and from side to side.

His prints at the Art Institute span more than 25 years but consist entirely of lines, bars and blocks of color, now thin as a thread, then wide as a fat brush, here crisply edged, there softly stained and overlapping other colors below. Sometimes his lines stretch into long bars of color. Elsewhere they're cut into crisp checkerboards of contrasting black, white and red.

One moment Scully will turn out a luscious inky lithograph like "Paris Black," which consists of thick, wavering bars of black in several shades, laced with bands of gold, celadon and cream. Evocative of the dramatic black-and-tan cathedrals of Tuscany, "Paris Black" seems a bold wall of architectural color. Then he uses similar bars in a 1986 woodcut, "Conversation," whose colors, textures and patterns suggest the speckles and flecks in 1950s linoleum.

Throughout this expansive show, Scully is a master of minimalist means who meditates on the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the novels of Albert Camus and Joseph Conrad, and the European landscape from Barcelona to Munich. How? By simply and expertly rearranging bars and bands, textures and cross hatchings, solids and voids, scale shifts and an array of overlapping colors from terra cotta to cream, blue-gray to inky black.

'The Contemporary Print' The official title of this College of Visual Arts show is "Revision, Reiteration, Recombination: Process and the Contemporary Print," an overbuilt moniker that signals the improvisational originality of much contemporary printmaking.

It is the first in an annual series of national exhibits the college is planning to complement its curriculum. Each of the school's 200 students is required to take at least an introductory course in printmaking and may concentrate in the field, said college president Ann Ledy, who was strolling through the gallery on a recent afternoon. The show's New York-based curator, Leslie Wayne, is a personal friend, Ledy said, as are many of the artists, some of whom had homes near Ledy's own vacation place in upstate New York.

While the personal connections are not directly evident in the show, they may help explain how so many prominent artists happen to be featured in the modest gallery of a 100-year-old St. Paul art school. There is a rare suite of typically enigmatic red designs by Louise Bourgeois printed on vintage canvas, for example, and a pair of aquatints by sculptor Martin Puryear (who designed the pillars at the entrance to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden) that reflect his enthusiasm for minimalist forms -- in this case a black shoulder yolk and a cream-colored arc. Leslie Dill's poetic hangings of faces photo-screened onto fabric, then stained and stitched are hauntingly expressive, as is the quilt-like aquatint "Mama's Song," by Mary Lee Bendolph.

The rest of the show encompasses a great deal of territory in a small space, ranging from the charming Pop-style flowers in Polly Apfelbaum's woodblock monoprint "Baby Love" to the eccentric towers, bridges, oil rigs and satellite discs in Nicola Lopez's intaglio "Monuments."

It is an ambitious and impressive exhibition appropriate to a school that expects to grow by 50 percent, to 300 students, in the next three years. "Looking forward, we're feeling very bullish and confident," Ledy said.

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431