In The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting, poet and critic Barry Schwabsky looks at the different directions that painting has taken since the turn of the millennium. He deflates the twentieth-century belief that abstraction and figuration in painting are dichotomous. Instead, Schwabsky argues, they are methods of asking or answering the questions: What is painting?

In response to recent developments in pictorial practice and critical discourse, Painting beyond Itself seeks new ways to approach and historicize the question of the medium. Reaching back to the earliest theoretical and institutional definitions of painting, this book focuses on the changing role of materiality in establishing painting as the privileged practice, discourse, and institution of modernity.

Merlin Carpenter’s exhibition “MIDCAREER PAINTINGS” filled Kunsthalle Bern’s rooms with transit blankets stretched over identically scaled frames, each named after one of the artist’s seven galleries and marked “not for sale.” This publication documents these “paintings,” how the works thematize the limbo of the “midcareer” artist, as well as the circulation of the artwork as a commodity that signifies material wealth or value.

Painting has demonstrated remarkable perseverance in the expanding field of contemporary art and the surrounding ecology of media images. It appears, however, to have dispelled its own once-uncontested material basis: no longer confined to being synonymous with a flat picture plane hung on the wall, today, painting instead tends to emphasize the apparatus of its appearance and the conduits of its circulation.

The exhibition deutschemalereizweitausenddrei (german painting two thousand and three) is a response to the needs and social circumstances that have given rise to painting’s present (return to) popularity, and to the strategies young artists are developing to meet this.