Painting is a continually expanding and evolving medium. The radical changes that have taken place since the 1960s and 1970s - the period that saw the shift from a modernist to a postmodernist visual language - have led to its reinvigoration as a practice, lending it an energy and diversity that persist today. In Contemporary Painting, renowned critic and art historian Suzanne Hudson offers an intelligent and original survey of the subject: a rigorous critical snapshot that brings together more than 250 renowned artists from around the world, whose ideas and aesthetics characterize the painting of our time. These luminaries include Cecily Brown, Theaster Gates, Josh Smith, Jenny Saville, Julie Mehretu, Takashi Murakami, Gabriel Orozco, Christina Quarles, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Zhang Xiaogang and many others. Organized into seven thematic chapters exploring aspects of contemporary painting, this is an essential volume for art history enthusiasts, students, critics and practitioners. With 245 illustrations in colour

Dazzling and playful, Katherine Bernhardt’s newest paintings highlight her fascination with American pop vernacular, from Pokémon and the Pink Panther to Crocs and psilocybin mushrooms. ---------- "Bernhardt has always been impressive for her ability to combine the immediate, seductive properties of paint with the infectious humor of topical pop culture." —Hyperallergic ---------- Bernhardt’s boundless visual appetite has established her as one of the most exciting painters working today. Thinking about the relationship between art, objects, and commerce, Bernhardt spotlights iconic motifs of cartoons and cultural symbols. Colors and lines bleed and pool together, revealing Bernhardt’s brisk and improvisational process. Monumental in size, subject matter, and vibrancy, Katherine Bernhardt’s works demand attention. Expanding upon the exhibition at David Zwirner, London, in 2022, this catalogue includes bonus paintings and works on paper—developing her ongoing body of work. With many details of Bernhardt’s paintings, this large publication gives the artist’s work ample space to play. Suzanne Hudson’s essay considers Bernhardt’s work from an art historical perspective and thinks through the relationship between the artist’s work and life.

I carry my landscapes around with me focuses on American abstract artist Joan Mitchell's large-scale multipanel works from the 1960s through the 1990s. Mitchell's exploration of the possibilities afforded by combining two to five large canvases allowed her to simultaneously create continuity and rupture, while opening up a panoramic expanse referencing landscapes or the memory of landscapes. Mitchell established a singular approach to abstraction over the course of her career. Her inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately evoke individuals, observations, places, and points in time. Art critic John Yau lauded her paintings as "one of the towering achievements of the postwar period." Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner New York in 2019, this book offers a unique opportunity to explore the range of scale and formal experimentation of this innovative area of Mitchell's extensive body of work. It not only features reproductions of each painting in this selection as a whole, but also numerous details that allow an intimate understanding of the surface texture and brushwork. In the complementing essays, Suzanne Hudson examines boundaries, borders, and edges in Mitchell's multipanel paintings, beginning with her first work of this kind, The Bridge (1956), considering them as both physical and conceptual objects; Robert Slifkin discusses the dynamics of repetition and energy in the artist's paintings, in relation to works by Monet and Willem de Kooning, among others.

This is the first monograph to offer a comprehensive account of the work of Californian artist Mary Weatherford (born 1963), beginning in the mid-1980s and extending to the present. Weatherford was a student of pioneering twentieth-century art historian Sam Hunter at Princeton. Her broadly literate and visually arresting paintings address the legacies of American modernists from Arthur Dove and Agnes Pelton to Willem de Kooning and Morris Louis, while grappling with the politics of gender, the representation of specific moods and experiences, and other concerns squarely rooted in the present moment. From her early monumental targets, through canvases studded with real shells and starfish, as well as more abstract evocations of landscape inspired by caves, to her recent neon-appended panels whose atmospheres of rolling color foreground the painting process itself, Weatherford's works argue forcibly and convincingly for the engagement of painting with contemporary life. Suzanne Hudson's text, the fruit of many studio visits and long interviews, reveals a singularly inventive artist whose boundless facility for reinvention will compel any viewer, student, or critic of painting.

THE ART OF WRITING ABOUT ART serves as a quick reference for students writing various types of essays, research papers, exhibition reviews, and even examinations. The premise of the book is that students in all disciplines, not just English, should be required to write well and that their instructors should hold these writing assignments to high standards. THE ART OF WRITING ABOUT ART not only emphasizes skills in college-level composition, but also in verbalizing the experience of art -- the historical, social, economic, and political forces that shape art and artists; art theory; and the interplay between artist and viewer.