New European Painting emerged in the 1980s and reached a critical point of major distinction and influence in the 1990s[1] with painters like Gerhard Richter,[2][3] Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and Bracha L. Ettinger[4][5][6] whose paintings have established and continue to create a new dialogue between the historical archive, American Abstraction and figuration.
[7] The major new European painters of this era show strong engagements with painful personal and general history, as well as shared history; its memory and its oblivion; and with life under the shadow of World War II, utilizing research in new and old materials, photography and oil painting.
Rather it is a renovative kind of abstraction and figuration that relates to the parallel practice of a turning into art of personal and historical photographic archives.
[10] New European Painting relates to the post-traumatic traces of war[11] and it involves working oil painting and drawings with new media like photography,[12] xerox[13][14] and digital media[15][16] to create and develop a postmodern archive "fever".
[17][18] This painting relates through this aspect to the post-World War II "archive" art with artists like Christian Boltanski and Jochen Gerz,[19] and it is often a part of this tendency.