Tom McGrath

This first comprehensive monograph on the young New York painter Tom McGrath, whom Artforum called "a painter's painter brimming with the desire to push oil paint to the limit of its descriptive potential," features a thorough analysis of his work by the noted art historian Robert Hobbs, in which Hobbs details McGrath's rethinking of traditional landscape painting. McGrath does not idealize the pastoral landscape, which is misaligned with present attitudes toward land use. Instead, he takes a far more objective look at the values such landscape invokes. McGrath accepts changes and ameliorates damage, setting the stage of the contemporary pastoral landscape so that its cracks and fissures are not only represented but are among its key distinguishing features. In addition to focusing on the changing landscape, McGrath's work reflects on the role of cars and highways in recent American culture--a subject that is further explored here in a selection of personal driving anecdotes by McGrath's contemporary, the artist Kevin Zucker.