The works gathered in Painting offer a miniature survey of the state of contemporary artmaking today. Working across still life, landscape, portraiture, and abstraction, these artists inherit and variously unsettle art-historical conventions. Like those of her forebears, Min Kyung Cho’s pearlescent plums and vibrant lemons both capture and refract the light, while Mark Flake’s claustrophobic tablescape, where branded cereal boxes and video cassettes abut classical busts and elegant botanical arrangements, feels resolutely modern: a latent critique of unchecked capitalism.

Landscape, too, is charged with competing temporalities. Julie Dreier’s mountainscape, swathed in lupines, idealizes the sublime drama of the American West, and Symmes Gardner’s white clapboard chapel recalls a pastoral imaginary of an older way of life. Meanwhile, Jack Snowden’s meticulously rendered scenes, in which an octopus blends into a mossy tree, and a frog appears in a looking glass propped against a rocky ridge, evoke a surrealism that registers the unreality of climate collapse. A similar sense of underlying dread animates Audrey Lee’s ornate vanitas paintings, where a lavishly dressed female figure picnics and plays violin beside a skeleton, the enduring manifestation of our ensuing mortality. In Steve Jensen’s mixed-media assemblage, a boat presumably crossing the river Styx is filled with translucent skulls, and a ghostly handprint, as though pressed against frosted glass, floats overhead. Heidi Brueckner similarly tests the boundary of the painted surface, using fabric, paper, and bubble mailer to lift her technicolor subjects into shallow relief.

Elsewhere, the pressure is socio-political. Myra Eastman’s mural-scale canvases layer vignettes of protests and ICE arrests, mirroring the frantic simultaneity of our internet age. Sean Renkert translates a comparable intensity into a dense field of fevered brushwork, fluorescent colors, and intermittent text. By contrast, other abstractions like Catalina Novac’s rosy skies, Katrina Lyon-Smith’s aquatic meditation, and Kim Sawula’s luminous indigo-teal-violet gouache appear almost remedial, a soothing reprieve from the chaos outside.

The theorist Leo Bersani championed art that was dedicated to discovering our “at-homeness in the world.” He imagined that, by seeing ourselves as harbored within the world, we might come to feel that the world cares for us in return. In these paintings, I see my own anguish, hope, desire, fear, hunger, ambition, and joy, and feel, if only briefly, less alone—and yes, a little more at home.

—Tara Anne Dalbow