Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists, Tate Britain

The Tate Britain’s Painting Now asks what one of the oldest, most traditional artistic mediums means in an age when anything can be art. It presents five contemporary artists - chosen for their distinctive takes on the medium of painting – and the different practices they deploy to produce their images. They aren’t well known, but those at the cutting edge rarely are. Go prepared to be intrigued and challenged.

The exhibition opens with Turner Prize winner Tomma Abts’ abstract work – complex shapes presented in muted retro colours. The uneven surfaces of her paintings betray the layers of revisions and re-paintings that give rise to the finished works. In contrast, masterful painter Simon Ling ’s work focuses on the highly realistic portrayal of urban and rural landscapes. Painted from life, in the open air, these are ordinary scenes made mesmerizing by the act of intense observation.

We loved the illusory paintings of Brussels-based artist Lucy McKenzie , whose work incorporates elements of craft, fashion and commercial graphics, and whose installation piece Slender Means (2010-2011) was recently used as a set by Belgian filmmaker Lucile Desamory. Her astounding trompe l’œils of pin board displays are one of the highlights of this exhibition – so keep an eye out.

Meanwhile, Catherine Story ’s Cubist- and cinema-influenced paintings explore the process of transposing the three-dimensional onto the flat canvas, and the works of 2005 Turner nominee Gillian Carnegie , who we were thrilled to discover, depict quotidian subject-matter – still-lives of flowers, a black cat on the stairs –with unsettling compositions and eerie realism.