From the Enlightenment through the 1980s the history of painting had been told through the modernist narrative of negation, a reductivist progression within art that resided at the core of avant-garde advancement ideology. As a counter to this trajectory, this thesis will look at painting through the lens of expansion, the notion that art, specifically painting, developed and progressed outward as opposed to linearly. This concept first surfaced out of postmodernist theory of the 1970s, specifically Rosalind Krauss's "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (1979), and can be applied now as a way to look at how painting has moved beyond a medium and into an object, theory, and discourse. This thesis will demonstrate how, in the effort to dismantle or "kill" the hegemony of painting, something more relevant did in fact occur: painting as a subject and an idea was opened up to a range of new possibilities. Through an art historical survey I track the patterns of painting's development and highlight a number of artists' practices, and propose how their work represents and embodies the expansion of painting, through spatiality, hybridity (conflation with other media), self-reflexivity (interaction with modern and conceptual traditions), and discursivity (with the market and institutions).