The mystery of painting

Painting has been pronounced dead at several points in the past hundred or so years; certainly painters have been conspicuously plagued by self-doubt, and we have seen the art of painting reduced to its separate icomponents of color, ground and brushstroke. Each of the painters included in "The Mystery of Painting" treats their art form as an emancipated, honorable medium that calls for neither conceptual apology nor for external justification. Linked not by a uniform style but by a common stance, their paintings are not images of the world but are about the world. From Matthew Ritchie's scientific mythologies to Karen Kilimnik's piercingly pretty portraits, from Chris Ofili's cross-cultural collages to Laura Owens's expansive doodles of flora and fauna, "The Mystery of Painting" proves that there's life in the old squirrel hairs yet.