Described by The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as a "precocious art star," German artist (Blinky) Palermo (1943-1977) has been associated with distinct twentieth-century art practices, from abstraction to Minimalism and Conceptual art. But his diverse body of work in fact defies easy classification. Throughout his brief and influential career-leading all the way up to his untimely death at the age of 33 - Palermo executed paintings, objects, installations, and works on paper that mined various contextual and semantic issues at stake in the construction, exhibition, and reception of works of art, eternally "stretching and questioning" the boundaries of every medium he touched. This fully illustrated catalogue features new scholarship by Christine Mehring and Christoph Schreier and documents the 2013 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York. It is the first publication to tackle Palermo's late work, which is characterized by explorations of the tensions between material and color, surface and depth, and figuration and abstraction- focusing in particular on the paper works he produced between 1976 and 1977, the last year of his life. "Less a system builder than an analyst working on intuition," writes Schreier in his catalogue essay, Palermo "explored surface, shape, and color - the constituent elements of the image - with the aim of turning them into actors with a lively and delicately balanced play of forces." The simplicity of the artist's vision is beautifully evinced by the catalogue's vibrant color plates, which reveal every stroke and each grain of paper shining through from behind the pigment.

Over the course of the past years, painting has undergone a spectacular renaissance in the arts capital of New York at the hands of a generation of artists who will no longer be told how art should and should not be made. Eleven positions reveal the current importance and variety of a genre many believed had no future. Today, it seems, painting is as alive in New York as it was during the period of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and of pop art in the 1960s. The difference is that there is now a plurality of styles and forms of expression. The spectrum ranges from the painterly experiments of Matt Connor via the wild post-pop paintings of Eddie Martinez to the neo-conceptual approaches of the likes of Antek Walczak and Ned Vena. Without prioritising any particular style, this volume documents the rich panorama of the medium of painting, which has moved on from the ideological battles about its existence and plays an important role once again.

In his first comprehensive monograph, Lukas Glinkowski opens up insights into his visual world. His studio paintings re-compose impressions and encounters from everyday life, creating a visual mashup: citations from art history, comics, and figures can be found on unusual backgrounds such as ingrain wallpaper, tiles, or mirrors. Glinkowski creates room to play with habitual ways of seeing and thinking. Viewers can configure contexts by themselves. Still, it does not stop with the process of viewing; visitors are often included in the process of painting and rediscover their own seemingly familiar world. Glinkowski's painting does not attempt to explain, but instead poses many questions.