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 Modern 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.

Kevin Zucker is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Since his first one-person exhibition in 2001, he has had solo shows at Greenberg Van Doren, LFL Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery in New York, Jablonka Luehn in Cologne and Paolo Curti & Co in Milan. His work has recently been featured in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center.

Tom McGrath was born in New Milford, CT, in 1978. He received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2000 and his MFA from Columbia University in 2002. He has had solo exhibitions at Zach Feuer Gallery, New York; Alain Noirhomme, Belguim and Lia Rumma, Italy. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Orlando Museum of Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. He lives and works in Brooklyn. www.zachfeuer.com