Sorcha Dallas

Size Matters examines the power of scale, and its potential to create and alter meaning, in recent British art. Featuring over thirty works from the Arts Council Collection, including sculpture, painting and film, Size Matters offers an insight into a current trend and reveals a prevailing obsession among artists with the relative size of things. The works selected feature recognizable objects that have undergone a process of enlargement or reduction, making the viewer feel tiny or gigantic by turn, prompting reconsideration of form, function and context.

Science continues to extend the limits of big and small, and reduction and enlargement enable artists to give visible form to matter of minuscule or immense dimensions. Mark Francis’ large monochrome paintings, Positive (1992) and Untitled (Negative 2) (1992), evoke the world found underneath the microscope. At the other end of the scale Gary Rough in Space (1995) constructs the unnerving infinity of the cosmos within the controlled confines of a mantelpiece. Size Matters is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring two new essays on the subject of scale by writer and art historian, Marius Kwint, and Natalie Rudd, the curator of the exhibition.