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Regina Held is nothing if not busy.

In 10 years at New Grounds Print Workshop & Gallery in Nob Hill, she's launched countless artists and showcased a remarkable range of local talent. She nurtures her 40-plus print-makers with unlimited access to presses, gallery space, supplies, staff and representation. She takes their work to national exhibitions. She offers classes in etching, monotype, collagraph, photogravure, lithography, relief and mezzotint.

People flock to her monthly openings, knowing they'll find high-quality art at affordable prices. She maintains an inventory of prints for sale in styles ranging from contemporary to traditional.

There's more.

Held today launches Matrix Fine Art, a gallery of paintings, sculpture and multimedia pieces by a who's who of the Albuquerque art scene.

Her new gig came about when Page Coleman, owner of the esteemed Coleman Contemporary Art, decided last fall to vacate her gallery next to New Grounds in the Nob Hill Art Complex and move down the street. It was Coleman who brought Held to the center when she bought it in 2000.

Coleman told her friend she'd be looking for someone to lease the space.

"It took me about a day to decide to do it," Held says. "I started imagining all kinds of strange businesses coming in. I wanted to keep it an art destination."

She added French doors to connect Matrix to New Grounds, took out some walls and coated the place in white paint.

She then went after her dream artists. She wanted New Mexicans who are dedicated, impeccable craftsmen, working in a variety of media and styles. "I had certain artists in mind," she says.

Her selling point was that Matrix wouldn't be just a show venue. "Albuquerque has lots of places to show art," she says. "What I offer is representation."

She has a stable of artists who will each get a solo show in coming months along with continued representation by Held, who has a clientele and track record through New Grounds.

Held has assembled an impressive starting lineup in a first-class inaugural show.

There's the splendid Albuquerque sculptor John Garrett, who creates majestic vessels of jagged pieces of metal, and curtains and structures of assorted mesh, rings, beads and found objects. His work is complex, edgy and beautiful.

Katrina Lasko's "Hurt" series jolts. She builds women's torsos of plaster, paints them black and pierces them with nails and rope, or binds them with bandages. In "Strapped," a brick is bound to an arching chest, a powerful and well-rendered image.

The renowned landscape artists Frank McCulloch and Russell Hamilton are on hand, their work drenched in impressionist color and fine detail.

David Koch's precise, graphic paintings are of wrecked cars, but what he's really illustrating are flawed human relationships; Iva Morris' exquisite realism illuminates unconventional subject matter, no better than in the amazing "Twenty Years," an ode to marital discord; Leo Neufeld's classic nudes are revealing in more ways than one.

Held gives us the dark surrealist Maximiliano Pruneda - his "Artiste Inutil," in which an artist's arms are cut off and strapped to his head, is a stunning image; and the dreamy surrealist Emily Trovillion, who has no peer when it comes to painting intriguing faces with mesmerizing eyes that lock you into place.

Though heavier on the figurative than the abstract, Held's exhibition is most definitely contemporary, a word she doesn't like.

"It's current," she says. "Contemporary is over-used and can mean too many things."

She's right. Current it is.