Small Things Considered

Laurence Miller Gallery is pleased to present Small Things Considered, our summer exhibition featuring more than 50 small works by more than 30 picture makers, both master and emerging artists.

The art of our age seems to be ever-growing. Tasked with filling mega galleries, art fairs, and blockbuster museum shows, the global art market has fostered ever-larger creations. Epic scale and spectacle have become the default mode of the day. Small Things Considered has been conceived in conscious opposition to this trend.

In assembling a show focusing exclusively on small-scale work, we have sought to highlight what is neglected when only the grandiose is considered. These works elevate a kind of expression that cannot be achieved when we only exhibit the sensational. The pieces gathered here embrace sensitivity, impermanence, delicacy, and modesty as some of the most affecting kinds of experience.

With over 50 works by 30 different artists, a wide array of approaches to the small gesture is on view. From 1949, we have Harry Callahan portraying his wife Eleanor as if from a great distance, her figure dwarfed by a black void around her. Ray Metzker’s photograph of children on a beach from two decades later is like a negative of Callahan’s image, the figures rendered   as silhouettes dancing across the ocean’s horizon. From Kazuo Sumida’s fleeting moments on the subway to Dominic Episcipo’s profile of Elvis carved out of raw beef, it is a diverse group of pictures that, whether through tenderness or wit, share a common sense of intimacy.

This summer we invite you to revisit not just a scale of picture, but a kind of looking. Come spend time with Helen Levitt, Walker Evans, Willy Ronis, Simone Rosenbauer, Larry Burrows, George Tice, Nathalie Zaro, Edward Weston, among many others.