We all love big; we love the drama of scale. But intimacy has its own magic, connecting us to the size of books, of faces, of mirrors, of things glimpsed in private, seen by one person at a time. Or not seen in full until the curious viewer steps closer.

A large exhibition of small paintings, Come A Little Closer, features the work of 70 plus artists.  The exhibition opens January 12 and continues through February 11, 2023.

“I remember once walking with Jacob Lawrence into his major Phillips Collection exhibition in Washington. On the entrance wall, the curators had made a HUGE mural-sized photo blow-up of one of the works from his Migration Series. It looked stunning. But then as we walked through the show, we came to the same work. Relatively tiny, not much bigger than Jacob’s two hands.  It was even more powerful, more mesmerizing, more inviting. It did not need to be wall sized to hold the wall, and that is something that Jake had known.”

Bridget Moore’s memory of a small, powerful Jacob Lawrence painting was the spark for Come a Little Closer, which gathers an unruly sampling of ostensibly “little” works with major impact. We all love big; we love the drama of scale. But intimacy has its own magic, connecting us to the size of books, of faces, of mirrors, of things glimpsed in private, seen by one person at a time. Or not seen in full until the curious viewer steps closer.

The works in this exhibition measure from tiny to 15”. The artists that created them have varied motivations, but all the works are meant to be the size they are; in other words none are preparatory studies. Some play with ideas of “real scale,” some counter our expectations of detail, others luxuriate in the compression of information.