• XS, Installation View, Parrish Art Museum. Photo: Gary Mamay

    XS

    April 17, 2021—April 3, 2022

    Veering from the norm of Museum exhibitions that are typically organized around artist, movement, location, or theme—XS focuses on dimension, presenting paintings and sculpture of diminutive size from the Parrish collection. Featuring 24 works from 1890 – 2010, XS invites visitors to engage with these Lilliputian pieces close-up, paying particular attention to detail.

    The exhibition presents work by many artists who work in a larger format but created versions of their landscapes, portraits, interiors, and abstractions on a significantly smaller scale.  Some of the works on view, by John Opper and Raymond Parker for example, are small scale studies for larger works.

  • XS, Installation View, Parrish Art Museum. Photo: Gary Mamay

  • XS, Installation View, Parrish Art Museum. Photo: Gary Mamay

  • XS, Installation View, Parrish Art Museum. Photo: Gary Mamay

Joe Fig conducts interviews and photographs artists in their studios, then miniaturizes this intimate view of their world. Namuth’s Pollock #10 references Hans Namuth shot from underneath a sheet of glass on which Jackson Pollock was demonstrating his signature “drip” style. Elizabeth Murray, Louisa Chase, and Sydney Albertini expose collective anxieties with tangled insides, off kilter head and arms, and spiky pin cushion forms.  West Coast abstractionist Frederick Hammersley uses flat shapes with sharp edges and creates his own frames.

Arthur B. Davies, Sherry Lord, Aaron Shikler, and the unknown painter of Woodland give depth and breadth to lapidary landscape. Robert Gober’s hand-crafted replicas of everyday objects give them a radiant presence, seen in the small paper envelope for “Extra Buttons.” Artist and frame maker Robert Kulicke, best known for his design of a simple welded band of polished aluminum, observed about his own  work that it was  “. . . more 17th-century than 20th.”