New European Painting emerged in the 1980s and reached a critical point of major distinction and influence in the 1990s with painters like Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and Bracha Ettinger whose paintings have established and continue to create a new dialogue between the historical archive, American Abstraction and figuration. 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 WWII, utilizing research in new and old materials, photography and oil painting.