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Given the widespread blurring of boundaries between media caused by the interdisciplinary inclinations of many of today's painters, the one thing held in common by the diverse array of artists gathered together in Vitamin P is, in the editor's bluntly literal view, the simple fact that "all of them share, at some stage, the process of covering a surface with pigments." Faced with this decidedly plural take on the current state of the medium, one might be forgiven for imagining that any attempt to discern distinct tendencies in serious painting today must automatically be doomed to failure. Vitamin P is not, however, the only stocktaking exercise of this nature to have been undertaken in recent years. Far from it. Recent medium-specific issues devoted to painting by art magazines such as Flash Art and Contemporary merely echo an existing curatorial trend. In light of the significant spate of large-scale museum surveys of contemporary painting over the past five years, it is instructive to note how frequently certain names recur and certain enabling predecessors are invoked, and how quickly certain patterns in form, content and affiliation have become established.

Vitamin P was published the same year as the exhibition Urgent Painting was mounted by Laurence Bossé and Hans-Ulrich Obrist at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Urgent Painting brought together some thirty youngish artists from around the world whose engagement with painting as a medium, as traditionally conceived, ranged from the relatively straightforward (e.g. Verne Dawson, Laura Owens) to the decidedly tangential (e.g. Liam Gillick). Meanwhile, just across town at the Centre Pompidou, preparations were under way for the exhibition Cher Peintre ... , which opened later the same year. In this instance, rather than attempt an overview of contemporary painting, curator Alison Gingeras chose to follow a currently prominent vein of rogue figuration from its putative historical roots in early 1940s Picabia. Moving briskly through the '50s, '60s and '70s via Bernard Buffet (this was, despite subsequent outings in Vienna and Frankfurt, a particularly French show), Sigmar Polke and Alex Katz, Gingeras then presented the work of a dozen or so contemporary painters under the more immediate, rumbunctious auspices of Martin Kippenberger, the title of whose 1981 show at Berlin's Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Lieber Maler, male mich...  ('Dear painter, paint me...') she had borrowed for the occasion. In the spirit of entente cordiale, perhaps, no artist appeared in both Paris shows.

Kippenberger, who died prematurely in 1997 at the age of forty-three, also loomed large as an ostensible tutelary spirit in a number of other recent surveys. One of his classic series of lugubriously self-deprecating self-portraits from 1988, resplendent in a pair of Picasso-esque giant underpants, was a distinct highlight of Judith Nesbitt and Francesco Bonami's 1999 show Examining Pictures at the Whitechapel Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, which presented one painting each by fifty-six artists from the '60s to the '90s. He was one of the senior figures among the thirty artists included in Douglas Fogle's Painting at the Edge of the World at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2001. He featured strongly in Bonami's second bite at this particular cherry, the controversial fifty-artist-strong Pittura/Painting: From Rauschenberg to Murakami, 1964-2003 , presented at last year's Venice Biennale. He also appeared in Peter Pakesch and Bernhard Burgi's Painting on the Move , a massive survey of twentieth-century painting, which sprawled over Basel's three major modern and contemporary art spaces (the Kunstmusem, Kunsthalle and Museum für Gegenwartskunst) during the summer of 2003, running more or less concurrently with the Biennale and thereby affording some interesting comparisons of curatorial emphasis. Unusually, Kippenberger was not included in the last exhibition to be mentioned in this brief survey of surveys, Painting Pictures: Painting and Media in the Digital Age  at the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, 2003, which included one hundred works by thirty-four artists. Despite this near ubiquity, it will be the closing contention of this short essay that the true spirit of Kippenberger, for better or worse, may be best represented by a number of younger artists who, for quite specific reasons, are not among the core crew favoured by these exhibitions.

Laura Owens: Untitled , 2003, acrylic and oil on canvas, 214 x 203 cm; courtesy Sadie Coles

A rough collation of the exhibition rosters from all seven shows, crude device though it may be, presents an intriguing picture of current curatorial opinion in Europe and North America concerning the most significant painting to have emerged since the early 1990s. Only two painters were included in five of the seven shows, the Los Angeles-based Laura Owens, and Elizabeth Peyton, who lives and works in New York. (It is worth noting that Owens and Peyton were also prominent among the relatively few painters included in this year's Whitney Biennial.) If we exclude artists who came to international prominence before the 1990s we find that three painters feature in four of the exhibitions - John Currin, Gary Hume and Thomas Scheibitz - while ten others have three shows each to their name: Glenn Brown, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Damien Hirst, Udomsak Krisanamis, Margherita Manzelli, Sarah Morris, Takashi Murakami, Michael Raedecker, and Luc Tuymans. All of these artists appear in Vitamin P , except for Hirst, who is arguably best known and certainly most accomplished as a sculptor . Despite much talk of the globalizing '90s, and the judicious inclusion of quite a few Asian and South American artists in Vitamin P , all but two of our oft-chosen few are from Europe or the US. Udomsak Krisanamis was born in Thailand, but he lives and works in New York. On the other hand, while Takashi Murakami now divides his time between Tokyo and New York, he is a genuinely Japanese phenomenon.

Murakami is the only one of these artists to have produced a manifesto of sorts by characterising his own work and that of a number of his compatriots as 'Superflat' in a 2001 exhibition and book bearing that title. The painting, and indeed the sculptural works, of his generation of Japanese artists are much beholden to the one-dimensional, yet psychosexually charged cartoon characters and spectacularly superficial graphic style of Japanese manga . Where 'flatness' is prominent elsewhere in current painting it is more akin to the sheen of the photographic print, the cinema screen or the computer monitor, than the flattened picture plane of Greenbergian modernism. It is a depthless field over which a variety of second-hand signifiers slip and slide, to varying effect, rather than an optical flatness that remains, in David Joselit's memorable phrase, mortgaged to psychological depth. Many of Sarah Morris's paintings, featuring complex, distended grids of glossy colour, are suggestive of close-up views of high-rise facades. They reflect the flattened perspective of the deep-city dweller as she moves among the curtain-wall canyons of the contemporary metropolis, a reading amplified by Morris's films such as Midtown , Capital and Los Angeles . Gary Hume applies candy-coloured paint to aluminium surfaces in simplified, semi-abstract designs that describe abbreviated portraits, still lives and landscapes. His fondness for the silhouette form confirms him as a contemporary proponent of a type of surface beauty and shallow composition that might be traced back through Alex Katz to Henri Matisse. While the most recent paintings of Laura Owens indulge in a unique, if not positively eccentric, clottedness of composition and surface alike, she initially came to attention as one of a group of young West Coast American painters whose rediscovery of the decorative coincided with critical attempts to revive the fortunes of 1960s Colour Field painting (a key intermediary figure for this generation was the painter Mary Heilmann). Glenn Brown's painting involves a literal, virtuoso flattening of the impastoed surface of a range of historical exemplars from Rembrandt to Auerbach. His distorted reworkings of old and not-so-old masters tend toward kitsch (a distinct fondness for Dalí and sci-fi illustrator Chris Foss is telling in this regard) and may be taken as tokens of a general flattening of affect in an age of mass-reproduced imagery.

Imagery culled from the mass-media is a prime source for much contemporary painting, a sign perhaps of the persistent influence on either side of the Atlantic of Andy Warhol and (certain aspects of) Gerhard Richter. Such images range from the photocopied magazine shots of celebrities and porn models employed as source material by Marlene Dumas, to the newspaper-cuttings of traumatic historical events, from the Holocaust to Belgium's colonial past, that haunt the paintings of Luc Tuymans. (Tuymans, incidentally, co-curated his own painting survey, Troublespot Painting at MuKHA, Antwerp, in 1999 with the artist Narcisse Tordoir.) While Peter Doig is in one sense 'a painter's painter', whose influence is evident on artists as different as Daniel Richter, Karen 'Mamma' Anderson and Elizabeth Magill, some of his most memorable paintings are derived from popular cinema and found photographs. His dystopian landscapes, at once melancholic and toxic, have something in common with the dour suburban vistas of Michael Raedecker, which seem similarly indebted to the eerie scenography of the low-budget thriller. Many of Elizabeth Peyton's lushly intimate paintings from the 1990s are of gorgeously distant celebrities, accessible only through photos in glossy magazines. John Currin best exemplifies that strain of sexually destabilising grotesquerie which Gingeras, among others, trace back to late Picabia, while Margherita Manzelli's disturbing succession of displaced, isolated and distorted self-portraits might more properly be discussed in terms of the uncanny rather than the grotesque. Currin has in recent years turned from 'low cultural' photographic sources toward art-historical high culture, his earlier depictions of listless teenagers, emaciated socialites, ghastly couples and improbably pneumatic sirens giving way to an overt, if equally eccentric engagement with old masters such as Cranach, Fragonard and Tiepolo. The dense patterns of tiny circles and elipses in the paintings of Udomsak Krisanamis derive from the underlying English-language newsprint which this linguistically-challenged immigrant has systematically obliterated, leaving visible only the open holes within the closed letters of the original text. The mass of material from which Thomas Scheibitz distills the images and shapes that meet and meld on the bravura surface of his paintings includes old postcards, posters and magazine photos, faded images of outmoded architecture and forgotten sculpture. Along with the more figuratively and narratively inclined Leipzig-born Neo Rauch, Scheibitz is the most prominent representative of a veritable cottage industry of painters from the former GDR that has surfaced over the past few years. While there remains a notable tendency among Dresden painters toward formalism and among Leipzig painters toward illustration, a certain amount of cross-pollination is also evident between these two rival local traditions.

Lucy McKenzie: Untitled (bi-curious) , oil and collage on canvas, 244 x 183 cm; courtesy Cabinet, London

A number of explanations might be offered for the preponderance of painting surveys in recent times and for the emerging pantheon they have cumulatively helped to establish. The more cynical might suggest the pressure of an overheated art market as a prime motivation. Auction prices are currently at their most inflated since 1989, just before the last big market crash, and a bullish market will always favour painting, especially figurative painting, over other art forms. A major painting by Marlene Dumas, born in 1953 and the only one of these artists over fifty, recently sold at auction for a startling $880,000. Several paintings by Murakami have fetched over $500,000 while record prices for Currin, Tuymans and Doig hover around the $400,000 mark. While museum curators may find this hothouse atmosphere difficult to ignore, market forces alone do not fully explain this curatorial consensus. The auction sales of all of the aforementioned artists are, for instance, dwarfed in volume by those of the forty-seven year-old Spanish painter Miquel Barceló who, alone among them, has broken the $1million barrier. (Hirst has too, but not with a painting.) Yet Barceló, whose constituency one imagines is largely Hispanophile, would appear to be more or less invisible to the critics, curators and editors in question. Nevertheless, quite a few of our core group of artists are represented by a small network of commercial galleries, chief among which are such quintessential '90s galleries on the New York/London axis as Gavin Brown's Enterprise (Doig, Krisanamis, Owens, Peyton), Sadie Coles HQ (Currin, Owens, Peyton) and White Cube (Hirst, Hume, Morris). The two oldest painters in the group, Dumas and Tuymans, are both represented by Zeno X in Antwerp. In heady times like these a painter's success, and the visibility and influence it entails, is more likely to be assessed, at least initially, in terms of the commercial gallery round than the public exhibition circuit, especially in the US. This is much less true of practitioners of other art forms, and far less obvious in Europe.

While contemporary painting may, as Schwabsky suggests, be characterised by a persistent refusal of its own self-containment, painting surveys by their very nature tend toward a contained order that can result in unfortunate distortions and exclusions. Regular departures from a signature style would appear to disqualify certain painters, as does explicit political engagement. Notable absences from our list include a number of otherwise feted painters whose work is concerned with issues of race, e.g. Ellen Gallagher, Chris Ofili, and Kara Walker. Less abrasive invocations of cultural difference, such as the noodle-encrusted abstractions of Krisanamis, would seem to be more acceptable. In general, such surveys still favour artists whose fidelity to the medium is clear and relatively single-minded. While the exclusion of, say, the films of Sarah Morris, the sculpture of Scheibitz, Brown and Murakami, or the performative work of Manzelli, is perfectly understandable within the logic of a painting survey, such exclusions may cumulatively contribute to a subtle devaluation of these artists' work in media other than painting. Finally, the profusion of such surveys has somewhat obscured the achievements of a number artists who might most reasonably lay claim to the mantle of the ferociously productive, effortlessly interdisciplinary, and exuberantly collaborative Martin Kippenberger. One such artist is the peripatetic, multi-tasking Scot Lucy McKenzie, who, in a catalogue essay for the recent exhibition Nach Kippenberger  at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, nominates as Kippenberger's true heir another such artist, the Cologne-based Kai Althoff, whose historically freighted and hauntingly febrile work in a wide variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, installation and experimental music, produced alone or with a variety of collaborators, has only recently begun to receive the international recognition it so richly deserves.

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith is a critic and a lecturer in the Modern Irish Department at University College Dublin.

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