Years ago, the Canadian collector Bruce Bailey gave artist Curtis Talwst Santiago useful advice: “Be patient,” he said. At the time, Santiago was working on miniatures, making diminutive yet emotionally massive universes that fit inside jewelry boxes. Santiago’s pocket dioramas, still a core of his practice, draw on memories from childhood—you peer upon tiny figurines suspended in time. In one box, just big enough for a pair of cufflinks, a group of Black bathers run and play around on a little beach that is no more than four inches long.
What Bailey meant was that he believed, in time, that art collectors would come to recognize the significance of art regardless of its scale. When I came across Santiago’s work in 2018, it stood out to me in a time marked by a push towards larger and larger paintings. At fairs and in galleries, canvases towered with a cold confidence that felt, at moments, unmerited.
But Bailey was right that things would change. Recently, smaller artworks have become more apparent in galleries and on fair floors. “It’s fascinating to see how perceptions shift, and value is redefined over time,” Santiago told me.
In the world of trend forecasting, there’s a measure called the “high heel index.” Coined by Trevor Davis, a former consumer IBM products economist, the idea is that heel height is correlated with economic upturns and downturns, with periods of austerity correlating with less assertive heels. Could the same be said for the length (and width) of paintings and art?

A lineup for lineups must be Friday. Always that one barber on the damn phone! Bruh, can you please finish my fade!? (2022). Size: 9.5 × 5 x 5 cm 3.5 x 2 x 2 inches. Courtesy the artist and Nir Altman
Supersize Me?
It turns out that the trend to supersize paintings as soon as an artist garnered some attention may have peaked in 2022—just as the art market was at its most bullish.
At Frieze that year, on the precipice of what Artnet dubbed the “great art market reset,” London painter Jadé Fadojutimi exhibited monumental paintings at her then-new gallery Gagosian, seven each on sale for £500,000 ($558,700). She was still an emerging artist, technically, and going big was the gambit of the moment. I remember standing at the fair that year trying to take in a Fadojutimi canvas so large that I had to back up to the other side of the aisle to fit it within my field of view. Her paintings—swirls of color, pops of yellow, and luminescent lavenders and pinks that came together in blended-up landscapes—were visually astounding and timed well to the post-figurative tastes of the market, but it was actually hard to even tell what I liked about them, so grand was their scale.
The late 2010s and early 2020s were a time when art went to towering heights. The scale seemed, at the time, to be pushed by (or on) young painters like Fadojutimi. Was I imagining it? No. From 2015 to 2016, the average painting size of Fadojutimi’s work, looking at paintings that circulated on the secondary market via the Artnet Price database, was something like 55 x 79 inches (140 x 200 cm). In 2021 and beyond, monumental works up to 79 x 118 inches (200 x 300 cm) became common, including The Woven Warped Garden of Ponder, which sold for nearly $2 million last year.

Jade Fadojutimi at Frieze London. Photo by Dave Benett/Getty Images
Similarly, the early digital paintings of Avery Singer, such as Cycladic Mask (2011) and Japanese Helmet Stand (2011), had dimensions around 36 by 36 inches and 40 x 29 inches, respectively—basically poster-sized. By the year she gained representation with Kraupa Tuscany Zeidler, the Berlin gallery that played a huge role in introducing her to European audiences, she was making outsize paintings that were much larger: At 72 x 96 inches, Dancers Around An E’gy to Modernism (2013) was the size of a pair of double doors. Her Happening (2013) was even grander, at 100 x 120 inches (it sold for $3,206,000 in 2024).
I am singling these two painters out, but they are not the only ones to see this size-value correlation. I’m certain there are a host of reasons why this could happen, and I don’t discount that the artist may simply have been interested in scale from a conceptual standpoint. But the scaling up certainly tracked the frothiness of the market. The sheer brashness seemed almost to foreshadow a bubble about to burst. Speculators who had been snapping up emerging works were beginning to vanish.

Art by Avery Singer is seen at the main pavilion of Giardini at the 58th International Art Biennale on May 07, 2019 in Venice, Italy. Photo: Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images.
Given the current queasy economic climate, where collectors are less interested in holding work in storage and shipping has never been more expensive, larger is just not inherently more desirable among buyers. Yet the flip side of this new caution is that a pattern of openness to smaller works is emerging. This can be seen, for instance, in the success story of Brook Hsu, a painter known for small, labor-intensive paintings in green washes. Hsu recently had her first solo exhibition that included these at Gladstone Gallery.

Brook Hsu View of the Green River From the Pinedale Anticline (Trapper’s Point) (2024), which measures 8,89 x 13,97 x 35,56 cm. © Brook Hsu Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. Photography by David Regen.
But the same holds true for very established artists. Recently, famed painter Chris Ofili sized down with a suite of works at David Zwirner Paris that made a virtue of their intimate quality. Works in his show “Joyful Sorrow” were even presented so that, when you got up close, you had to lift a silk curtain to see the small painting underneath it.
The Vermeer Effect
No one was surprised that a 2023 Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum was a huge blockbuster, of course, even though the paintings of this quintessential Old Master are rather small. Sensing, perhaps, a change in the weather, this year, the Danish answer to Vermeer was minted at Hauser and Wirth: The gallery debuted 16 small works by the 19th- and 20th-century painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916). Like Vermeer, Hammershøi paintings are delicate, minimal, detailed-oriented, and small. They frequently focus on domesticity: quiet interior scenes, farmstead moments, and muted cityscapes.
Such rediscoveries could have a knock-on benefit for contemporary artists. The market obsession with Hammershøi and the bottomless enthusiasm for Vermeer is being mirrored in the domestic interiors we see so much of now in the contemporary market (my colleague Annikka Olsen noted this in her piece on the trend of “maximal intimism.”) Los Angeles dealer Chris Sharp pegs the lockdown as part of the catalyst: “During the pandemic, everyone was at home, looking at their interiors. That really engendered this and had a huge impact on it.”

A museum goer with Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Red Hat (ca. 1665) at “Vermeer” at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Photo by Henk Wildschut, courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
When we met, Sharp was showing luminescent works by Tyler Vlahovich that oscillate between abstract patterns and recall foliage or landscape reliefs. The paintings were not small, but the dealer noted that it was easier to sell the smaller works than the larger ones. “Before, people were more drawn to larger pieces,” he added.
Sharp previously ran the micro-sized gallery LuLu in Mexico City before relocating to a larger space in Los Angeles under his own name. Yet if showing small-sized works was in part a product of limited space, it was also connected to a long-time interest in “economy as an almost spiritual principle,” he explained. “I have continually interrogated the idea that bigger is better.”

Installation view of paintings by Altoona Sultan at Chris Sharp Gallery at Independent in 2022. Photo by Sebastion Bach. Image courtesy Chris Sharp Gallery.
Shipping and Storage Squeeze
Clearly, shifting tastes around scale are tied to changing economics—or just to the pragmatic reality of space, married with a decline in sales in an inflationary economy. The ultra-contemporary category of art, which includes most of the emerging market stars I mention, has suffered the most at auction as per our Mid-Year Intelligence Report. Buyer demand has shifted dramatically.
Collectors, in some cases, are scaling down. In the recent Art Basel x UBS Report, 55 percent of respondents said they put work up for sale because they had limited storage space. This might also inform future decisions. Smaller works might also appeal to a wider layer of collectors, especially those who don’t have multi-city storage options or several homes to adorn.
Art advisor Sibylle Rochat has noticed the shift of interest. “For the last 18 months or so, people have been in more of a reflection phase about what they have in their storage and what they want to live with and what they want to keep. This reflection has pushed them to ask about more domestic-sized works,” she said. “There is a new financial reality, but there are many different ingredients.”
Shipping prices have soared. According to the Ship&Co blog, the general rate increase for shipping jumped 5.9 percent in 2022; FedEx and UPS rates jumped again, by 6.9 percent in 2023. When it comes to art shipping companies, which also handle crate-building for works and storage logistics, pricing can be like the “Wild West,” says Rochat. “For young artists, sometimes the shipping will be as expensive as the painting.”

Installation view, Olivia Jia, Perimeter at Margot Samel, New York, NYC, 2023. Photo by Gregory Carideo.
New York dealer Margot Samel, co-founder of the boutique fair Esther, presented work by Chicago-born, Philadelphia-based painter Olivia Jia at NADA in Paris earlier this fall. Samel notes that there is a “level of practicality” to Jia’s tiny scale, for galleries, collectors, and artists: “They’re easier to handle, ship, and they take up less ‘retail space.’”
Of course, they might also sell for less. Yet a shift to decoupling size and price tag may eventually emerge as more of these small-scale works begin to appear at fairs and exhibitions, developing their own mystique. What really justifies the extra price for big work, really?
“The scale of [Jia’s] works asks viewers to walk up close and approach them. They demand intimacy,” argues Samel. “The size of the work arises from the subject matter of the paintings.” Jia’s paintings depict open books at life-scale, so their dimensions are very much intentional. Collectors still often ask for larger and more substantial works by the artist—but she simply does not go above 24 inches.
“I do have to justify scale, especially at art fairs. Sometimes collectors have to wrap their head around why a painting that appears to them as a small-sized work is priced at a more established price point,” the dealer explained. “There are so many different factors that go into pricing in general. But at this point, I do not have to justify the size as much any more.”
In a time of economic uneasiness, the value system around size is changing. For a few years there, it seemed as if a square inch of canvas equated to a given dollar value, and this was art-market common sense. (One source I spoke to tried to argue that bigger paintings do, indeed, require more paint.) This kind of mania seems to be passing.
On the Grid, It’s All the Same
The Jia example shows that it is not merely austerity that is driving taste. Recently, I saw the frankly titled “Small Works 2022-2024” by Shota Nakamura, currently on view at Clearing in Los Angeles. His moody and bucolic figurative paintings have long felt a bit like fever dreams, and his new works are no different, albeit smaller. At around 12 to 14 inches, they offer a refreshing prompt: They ask you to step in and get intimate.
In a decade that has been characterized by so much online viewing, seeing a work that demands this kind of interaction has a certain sensory thrill. Both dealers and art advisors have told me collectors increasingly want to see work in-person before buying. “People are buying less and less sight unseen and they are buying more meaningfully,” said Rochat, the art advisor. She says she has been doing more in-person viewings than previously.
On social media, everything is rendered at 1080 x 1080 pixels, no matter its size. Toying with how scale is lost online—and highlighting the pleasures of scale that only an in-person view reveals—was on the mind of painter Elizabeth Jaeger when she collaborated with Ingrid Lundgren of Winterstreet Gallery on a show called “Double Threshold” this fall. Works shown at the Edgartown, Massachusetts space were effectively doubled: Each artist made a miniature artwork that was installed in a scaled-down model of the space. Meanwhile, in the normal space, a separate work was shown by the same artists working at their usual scale. In the show’s documentation, there is a moment of uncertainty about which scale you are looking at. “Details in the works emerge in a different way within the smaller enclosed space,” Lundgren explained.
“There was no way to capture the experience unless you were walking around the space and seeing the play between each artist’s work—the small work they made and the bigger work they made—but also artist to artist,” said Jaeger. The small works shown in the miniature gallery looked massive on the model’s wall space; normal-sized works in the actual gallery looked diminutive by comparison, in some instances. These clever juxtapositions underlined how size is relative. (The press release for “Double Threshold” quoted Barnett Newman: “size is nothing: what matters is the scale.”)
“A lot of artists are asking what a small surface can hold,” Jaeger told me when I asked her about the trend towards smaller formats. She added that part of the draw for smaller work is mobility, given that today artists are more mobile than ever.

Lounge (2022), 25 x 30 cm. Courtesy the artist
Size x Value
The turn to small art is not without its own pitfalls. Chris Sharp noted as much. “I do wonder with this trend towards smaller work if there is something almost cute about it, and at times a little smug,” he said. “I am interested in smaller works from a point of rigor… but sometimes, I do wonder if it is pandering a little.”
The difficulty of working at this scale is something that is not always understood—but also what can make it rewarding for artists and viewers alike, when a work strikes the right balance.
The painter Mia Middleton says there’s an ongoing “misconception” about small works being easier and safer for an artist. “I have had some people come up to me saying ‘you’ll get there, you’ll get to your larger pieces eventually.’ But I do not see it like that. This scale can be maddeningly unforgiving. There is something freeing about making big gestures on a canvas. Here, you cannot do that.”
Working with Coma Gallery in Chippenhale, Australia, and Roberts Projects in L.A., Middleton is known for intimate scale, exploring memory triggers and voyeurism via images that feel like a snapshot or a still from a film. They often capture seemingly fleeting poignant details: a pair of feet in shoes or a few autumnal leaves still clinging to tree branches.
“I think there is an inherent delicacy and mystery in images, which are small enough to be ‘discovered’ and intimately engaged with,” said Middleton. “There is something so luscious about painting at life’s scale.”