First there was the schlock horror of Sensation which introduced the world to Tracey Emin, the Chapman brothers, maggots and more of Damien Hirst's cabinet of pickled curiosities, all wrapped in the pouting punk attitude of the YBAs (Young British Artists).

Then came the New Neurotic Realists who faded from the memory as fast as the hype around their show.

Now prepare yourself to be truly shocked. For the next big thing in modern British art is the New Gentleness. And it involves lots of that supposedly endangered species, the painter. Massed watercolourists are not about to storm Tate Britain and ransack the Turner prize show, but something is stirring, though no one dares to use the word movement.

Artists are tired of being pigeon-holed and tagged with the monicker of one group or another, according to Judith Nesbitt, who is curating Days Like These, the Tate's triennial survey of the contemporary scene, which opens next month.

As if to subvert the idea of a "new generation" of artists, Nesbitt and co-curator Jonathan Watkins, director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, have included such established "grown-up" names as painter Peter Doig and sculptor Richard Deacon and the granddaddy of all British modern art, 80-year-old Richard Hamilton, with Nick Relph and Oliver Payne, a pair of whippersnapper guerrilla film-makers not long out of art school.

Having said that, Nesbitt and Watkins, who chose 23 artists "that represent the moment", divine a new spirit stirring in the backrooms, warehouses and draughty studios across the country.

And it is not about the exclusive group dynamic that herded so many artists over the last decade into little gangs - principally those who went to Goldsmiths College and whose works were snapped up by advertising guru turned art collector Charles Saatchi.

Nesbitt senses a wistful "gentleness" abroad among artists which runs counter to the sneering judgment current in popular culture. "You can see this gentleness in a lot of the work. There is a real dreaminess and a reflectiveness, for instance, in Mike Marshall's video Sunlight, which is just an ordinary scene of the sun going behind a cloud: a play of light and shadows. It's lovely and it gives you time to stop and look, a moment that we don't always pay attention to in the normal flow of life and yet is no less special than some of the supposed big moments," she said.

"That is why the title Days Like These seemed appropriate. Because it is not about something necessarily extraordinary, about art claiming a special case for itself. It is much more about art being a way of experiencing the here and now. So there is a kind of ordinariness there but also the possibility of reverie and discovery."

A third of the chosen 23 are painters of one type of another, and Nesbitt and Watkins deliberately set out to create an exhibition that was visually ravishing. "It is an honest, colourful experience that will appeal directly to the viewer and requires no prior knowledge," he claimed.

Nesbitt insists this is no populist gimmick, but an honest reflection of what is happening in the world outside the gallery walls. "Painting is just really strong at the moment. People get worked up and a bit neurotic about painting - it is always in perpetual crisis if you believe everything you read. In fact, it is a fantastic time for painting.

"We have painters like Gillian Carnegie who is working with traditional genres - still life, landscape - and Dextor Dalwood who is trying to create contemporary history painting with works about Kurt Cobain, Richard Nixon and OJ Simpson. There is a real confidence there. Painters are feeling freed up right now to do the things that painting can do that other mediums can't."

A third painter, Margaret Barron, has broken free of the gallery altogether and will display her landscape paintings on sticky tape in and around Tate Britain, on walls and lamp posts.

"She took a photograph of what you can see from each spot where the paintings will be placed and then painted the scene. So you will have the view and her painting of it in the same place," Nesbitt explained.

"The paintings are accorded none of the respect paintings in a gallery are. They are very beautiful but humble. They are exposed to the rain, to the council's anti-graffiti squad and to anyone who tries to pick them off. We hope they won't because they are absolutely gorgeous but they don't call attention to themselves; they are like club stickers or flyposters."

If one thing unites the artists in the show, Nesbitt argued, it is their unwillingness to be lumped together under one banner. "The show is a kaleidoscope of the here and now," she said. "There are points of connection even if the works look very different. There isn't one brand or one single direction which simply reflects the state of things at the moment. We have got well beyond the YBA thing. Artists are not producing works in terms of a generation. We are in a moment of liberation when artists are allowed to say what they want to say without feeling constrained by being part of a big over-riding idea.

"Instead, we have correspondences between artists of different generations," she added.

Which is why the octogenarian Richard Hamilton who taught another artist in the show Tim Head - himself now a teacher - is included, with his Michelin road maps to the replica of Marcel Duchamp's seminal work, The Large Glass, he made with the help of the French master in 1958.

Days Like These opens with two of Turner prize winner Rachel Whiteread's latest casts. The stairway from an old synagogue in the East End of London and the reverse space of a flat nearby will fill the front of the Duveen galleries.

Her work will give way to a giant 13-metre high wall mural to be created by Ian Davenport by squirting paint from a syringe at the top of the wall and letting it dribble down.

Further in, the Scottish artist Nathan Coley, who attended the Lockerbie trial, has rebuild the witness box from the courtroom at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, as a meditation on truth.

' Days Like These opens on February 27 and runs until May 26 at Tate Britain.

Guardian Unlimited ' Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

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