The quiet return of the small painting.
For most of the past two decades, the dominant scale in contemporary painting has been very large. A loose cohort of British and European painters, working at the opposite extreme, is making the case for the work that fits in two hands.
If you have walked through the public-facing contemporary painting galleries of London, Berlin, or New York in the past fifteen years, you will have noticed a recurring scale. Paintings made for the larger commercial galleries tend, with rare exceptions, to be at least one and a half metres in their shortest dimension. The very largest paintings — works of two or three metres on a side, sometimes more — have become, in many of these spaces, the visual default.
There are good reasons for this. Large paintings photograph well. They survive the journey from the studio to the gallery to the art fair to the printed catalogue without losing too much of themselves in the process. They make a useful argument about ambition, both to the viewer in the room and to the collector at a distance. They occupy a quantity of physical space that justifies, by simple weight, the prices at which they tend to sell.
There are also, however, costs. A painting made at the dominant scale of contemporary commercial practice is, by virtue of its size, optimised for being seen at a distance. It is not, in most cases, designed to reward the close kind of looking that painting historically asked of its viewers. The viewer of a three-metre painting stands six metres away. The viewer of a thirty-centimetre painting stands sixty centimetres away. These are different forms of attention, and they produce different forms of work.
What the small painting asks for
A loose cohort of painters working in Britain and across northern Europe — mostly in their thirties and forties, mostly without significant commercial gallery representation — has been quietly making the case for the small painting as a primary, rather than a secondary, scale of practice. The works in question typically measure between fifteen and forty centimetres on the longest side. They are made, in many cases, in domestic studios. They are shown, when they are shown at all, in small group exhibitions, in artists' own homes, or in spaces specifically designed to accommodate them.
The case for the small painting, as articulated by the painters I have spoken to over the past nine months, has three components. The first is technical. The small painting permits a density of attention from the maker that is not, in practical terms, available at larger scales. A painter working at thirty centimetres can revise and reconsider every square centimetre of the surface in a way that a painter working at three metres simply cannot. The result, when it is done well, is a level of internal coherence that the larger painting can only approximate.
"A painting made at the small scale is, by virtue of its size, an instrument of close looking. It asks of the viewer the same kind of attention it asked of the painter."
The second component is economic. A small painting can be made, materially, for under a hundred pounds. It can be stored in a flat. It can be transported, by hand, in a backpack. The fixed costs of making small paintings, over the course of a year's practice, are an order of magnitude lower than the fixed costs of making large paintings. This permits, in turn, a kind of working freedom that the larger format generally precludes. The painter is not obliged, by the simple economics of materials, to sell what they make.
The third component is the relationship with the viewer. A small painting hangs at a specific height, in a specific room, at a specific distance from the viewer. It does not, generally, dominate a wall. It exists in a more equal relationship with the other objects in the room. The viewer who encounters a small painting is closer to the painting, both physically and tonally, than the viewer who encounters a large one.
What it looks like in practice
The paintings I have seen, in the course of researching this essay, are extraordinarily varied in style. Some are tightly representational. Some are entirely abstract. Some sit somewhere in between, in the small but persistent tradition of British painting that has, since the late twentieth century, found ways of being both figurative and quietly strange. What they share is not a style. It is a relationship to scale.
The painters tend, in my experience, to work in series. A series of fifteen or twenty small paintings, made over a period of months, will often be conceived of as a single piece of work — to be shown together, in the order the painter has settled on, in a specific small room. The exhibition, when it happens, is closer to a chapter than to a survey. The viewer walks through the series in a particular sequence, at a particular pace, with the paintings in conversation with each other.
This is not, of course, an entirely new way of working. Painters have made small paintings, in series, for as long as painting has existed. What is new is the conscious refusal of the larger format as the assumed default. The painters working at this scale today are not making small paintings because they have not yet graduated to large ones. They are making small paintings because the small painting is the work.
What this means for galleries
The traditional commercial gallery is, in most respects, not equipped to show this work. The walls are too large. The lighting is too bright. The expectations of foot traffic are too high. A room designed to show a single two-metre painting is, by its nature, the wrong room for a series of fifteen small ones.
The painters I have spoken to are, by and large, comfortable with this. Several have developed working relationships with very small project spaces — rooms of perhaps twenty square metres, often in residential buildings, sometimes by appointment only. Several show their work primarily in their own studios, by arrangement with collectors and visitors who are willing to make the trip. Several have abandoned the commercial gallery model entirely and sell directly from their studios, at prices set by the maker rather than by a dealer's markup.
None of this is, in 2026, a sustainable basis for a career in the conventional sense. The painters making this case are, in many cases, supporting themselves with other work. They are not making small paintings because they expect to be rewarded by the existing art market. They are making small paintings because they have, after a long period of thinking about the question, concluded that this is the work they want to make.
What I would say
I am, by temperament and by experience, suspicious of arguments about scale that masquerade as arguments about quality. The small painting is not, in itself, better than the large painting. The large painting is not, in itself, better than the small one. The question of scale is, properly understood, a question about the kind of attention the painter wants to ask of the viewer, and the kind of relationship the painter wants to have with the room.
What I will say is that the work being made at the small scale, by the painters I have been following over the past two years, is among the most carefully made painting I have seen in a long time. It rewards close looking. It rewards repeated looking. It is, in the precise sense, work that wants to be looked at properly. That is a quality I have not, recently, often found in the work made at the dominant scales of commercial practice.
I do not know whether the small painting will return to the centre of the conversation about contemporary practice. I do know that, if it does, it will be because the painters making this case have continued to make the case, regardless of whether anyone is listening. They have been doing so for some time. I am beginning to think it is worth our listening.