In this paper, we develop a new framework for contourlet-based statistical modeling using finite Mixtures of Generalized Gaussian distributions ( MoGG). On the one hand, given the rich directional information provided by the contourlet transform (CT), we propose to use a redundant version of the CT, which describes texture structures more accurately. On the other hand, we use MoGG modeling of contourlet coefficients distribution, which allows for precise capturing of a wide range of histogram shapes and provides better description and discrimination of texture than single probability density functions (pdfs). Moreover, we propose three applications for the proposed approach, namely: (1) texture retrieval, (2) fabric texture defect detection, and 3) infrared (IR) face recognition. We compare two implementations of the CT: standard CT ( SCT) and redundant CT ( RCT). We show that the proposed approach yields better results in the applications studied compared to recent state-of-the-art methods.