Contemporary painting has become a vehicle for re-evaluation — of historical events, the role of the image in society, and the method of painting itself. Traditionally, the form has defined artist and viewer alike by nation, gender, and race, but now, the canvas challenges and refutes the sanctity of such classifications.

Wilhelm Sasnal, David Noonan, and Kaye Donachie use found images in their painting as an alternative means of documentation. In widely varying styles, Sasnal distills the historical, social, and political significance of particular events and observations from his own life. Noonan's figurative collages and multipanel silkscreens confront the workings of memory with overlaid, mismatched scenes that elude narrative coherency. Donachie probes the paradoxes of radical belief by depicting communal moments from '60s-era subcultures, populated by unsettling, spectral crowds. Ghostly figures also appear in Mamma Andersson's paintings, in which the mythical coexists with the everyday and oblique perspectives reveal portentous visions.

Elsewhere, the Leipzig School's Neo Rauch distorts the confined aesthetic of social realism to create large, surreal canvases of continuous narrative. In works such as Höhe, Rauch recalls advertising from Communist East Germany with architectural elements, industrial symbolism, and heroic figures set in a confused, elaborate scene.

Raqib Shaw and Cecily Brown both consider the extremities of the flesh and its desires and appetites. Fantastical creatures swarm in an underwater world simmering with erotic tension and violence in Shaw's brilliantly colored Garden of Earthly Delights. Meanwhile, Brown addresses the human form in rigorous works that reveal fragments of frenzied, grappling bodies moving between figuration and abstraction.

Returning to compositional principles in Suite à Onze no 19 and Février, Bernard Frize studies pure form with colorful loops and interlocking rectangles. The architecture of abstraction is reconstructed in Mark Grotjahn's skewed geometric paintings, which transform the viewer's visual perception into emotive energy. Similarly, Julie Mehretu's Congress overlays static urban-planning and architectural renderings with a coded language, imagining a densely populated modern environment.

Manipulating classical imagery, Kehinde Wiley and Wei Dong play on conventions of glorification, heritage, and power. Wiley recontextualizes contemporary African American identity by transplanting black men into the canon of Western European portraiture. Wei Dong's pastoral landscape A Beautiful Day exposes a fleshy, nude woman flanked by two others wearing Chinese military fatigues. Waifish girls populate Aya Takano's whimsically subversive paintings, which combine classical Japanese and Western references with futuristic imagery in a strangely familiar and intimate world.

In many of these works, nostalgia is distorted as artistic genres intertwine — an indication of the ways in which painting moves forward while still retaining a sense of the past.

-Sarah Stephenson