Inspired by the singular if unfashionable vision of Franz Erhard Walther, under whom he studied at Hamburg’s Hochschule für Bildende Künste in the late 1990s, Jonathan Meese has developed a self-consciously grandiose vision of “total art” that continues to shape his output and its reception. This exhibition, “DR. TRANS-FORM-ERZ,” gathered seventy-odd drawings made by the German artist over the past twenty years or so, but only scratched the surface of his expansive and deliberately contrarian practice. A scattershot installation of works on paper in the gallery’s ground-level space was paired with a chaotic new installation in its upstairs room; together, these constituted a partial but characteristically ripe sampling of Meese’s various fixations, which are centered on historic cultural figures from Nero to Stalin, Richard Wagner to John Wayne.

The last time that New York saw Jonathan Meese, it was in 2011, for a show at Bortolami Gallery titled Hot Earl Green Sausage Tea Barbie (First Flush) and an opening-night performance, War “Saint Just (First Flash).” For the performance, Meese — a striking figure with long black hair and a thick beard, a black leather overcoat cloaking his signature Adidas tracksuit — preached the doctrine of his Dictatorship of Art in urgent, piercing English and German. After the crowd dispersed, what remained of the spectacle looked like a DIY film set for an intergalactic battle between James Bond, the Nazis, and some mutant-alien femme fatales.

For Jonathan Meese: Dr. Trans-Form-Erz, the artist’s first exhibition at the David Nolan Gallery, Meese’s self-made world is this time contained within a relatively streamlined installation, one that offers the viewer an opportunity that can be hard to come by in his practice: unmediated contact with the imagery, with attention given to the artist as a painter and collagist whose work has developed over time.

When he was younger, the German provocateur was often labelled an enfant terrible. But Meese, now forty-six, is still churning the history of his homeland into anarchic, sexually charged, and reliably sloppy paintings, plays, and operas, none of which are for the easily offended. (The artist has been tried and acquitted in German courts more than once for the crime of using the Nazi salute in his performances.) His first New York outing in five years features comparatively decorous works on paper: ballpoint sketches of sprites wearing the Iron Cross, illustrated books slathered with fluorescent paint, and a powerfully indecorous portrait of Richard Wagner, whose redemptive “Parsifal” is one of the artist’s touchstones. A large-scale installation—a walk-in fun house of collaged body parts and anxious scrawling—gives a sense of Meese at full blast.

Is it cheating, one wonders, to mount an elegantly installed, well-balanced exhibition of wild and wooly, hyper-expressive messy work by painter, sculptor, and performer Jonathan Meese? Such is the dilemma posed by “DR. TRANS-FORM-ERZ,” a selection of some seventy works on paper created over twenty years. A self-proclaimed mama’s boy with a bad temper, the eccentric German artist, born in Tokyo, was deeply influenced by American popular culture. He shows his love for retro Hollywood with portraits of a John Wayne hero, Zorro, Lolita, Mr. Spock, and other characters. Other drawings give comeuppance to history’s villains: Stalin, Caligula, Nero, and of course, Hitler. Not least in this mix is Meese himself, whose drawn and photographed likeness appears in many collages.