The ongoing struggle of painting – leading to recurrent announcements of its ‘demise’ and subsequently of its ‘return’ – serves as point of departure for an examination of ‘expanded painting’. The article suggests that contemporary painting is not only a field of incessant disciplinary and discursive battles over the essentially self-reflective question of “What is painting?” Over the last decades it has also become an intermedial laboratory in which artists experiment with developing a connective aesthetic in the interface between painting and other media. Accordingly, it is has become a commonly held opinion that painting has transformed itself into an expanded field and thus renewed itself – again. The article argues that in recent decades a remarkable number of painters have explored the possibility of developing painting by redefining what ‘space’ is in relation to painting. Much energy has been put into expanding painting physically by exploring painting’s relations to objects, space, place, and ‘the everyday’. The text focuses on works of art that are conceived as an installation based on the medium of painting, including works by Slovak artists Dorota Sadovská and Daniel Fischer. Its discussion of the ways in which the transformation of painting into installation affects the relationship between the work and its contexts eventually leads to a consideration of how Slovak art is positioned in relation to the Western artworld understood as a system of centres and peripheries.

Text in English (pp. 66-83) and Slovak (pp. 44-65).