Spanning all cultures and an ever-expanding range of art styles, painting is now a vibrant part of contemporary fine art practice, which has experienced a renewed interest in recent years.

Major institutions and galleries, such as the Tate, have featured painting significantly over the past decade and it has benefited from an increasing presence in art journals. Elsewhere in the wider world, influential new painting has emerged from eastern Europe and China. Gaining a new relevance and focus, the discipline is viewed as a rich, complex language of its own.