Sean Kelly presents The Audacity of Scale, a group exhibition that investigates the varied and often unexpected ways artists utilize scale both formally and conceptually. The exhibition considers how scale challenges perception, informs meaning, and influences the viewer’s relationship to the work. Spanning painting, photography, video, works on paper, and sculpture, The Audacity of Scale includes a broad roster of international artists and includes works from the microscopic, to the monumental.

James Casebere’s early photograph evokes the allegory of Plato’s cave, whilst referencing the landscape of the American West, blurring boundaries between illusion and reality. Marcel Duchamp’s Élevage de poussière (Dust Breeding) documents the accumulation of dust on the surface of his masterpiece The Large Glass, over the period of one year, whilst evoking images of the Nazca plain and aerial photography. Grand in size, Frank Thiel’s photograph of a weathered paint surface, in a preunification Berlin factory, is transformed into an abstracted architectural landscape. Employing worldbuilding, Sun Xun’s leporello combines expressionist symbolism with historical narrative, interrogating the construction of individual memory, official history and state propaganda in contemporary China.

Monumental paintings by Sam Moyer and Janaina Tschäpe are juxtaposed with intimately scaled works by Ana González, Zac Langdon-Pole, and Aki Inomata, which explore humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Sam Moyer’s large-scale painting balances organic forms with architectural corporeality, whilst Janaina Tschäpe’s gestural surfaces evoke biomorphic growth and fluidity. Ana González’s EUGLOSSA depicts an orchid bee, covered in reclaimed gold, that references extractive mining practices, and reflects upon the longstanding mutual relationship between flora and fauna and immense ecological impacts on the Amazon’s ecosystem. Aki Inomata’s video examines the relationship between an octopus and a 3d printed shell, considering scale, not only as a matter of physical size, but also a measure of evolutionary time, adaptation, and interspecies relationships. Combining a meteorite, cradled within a delicate nautilus shell, Zac Langdon-Pole connects the depths of the ocean to the vastness of interstellar space.

In Diana Fonseca Quiñones’s video, scale is playfully invoked as the artist’s hand traverses Havana’s urban skyline. Katharina Fritsch’s St. Nicolas subverts devotional imagery, through domestic scale, a vivid fuchsia palette, and stylistic rendering, transforming traditional iconography into a psychologically charged sculpture that subverts perceptual expectations. Rebecca Horn’s painting, from her seminal Bodylandscapes series, reflects her investigation into bodily limitation and spatial awareness. Similarly, Callum Innes’s Exposed Painting is a masterful example of the largest painting the artist can physically make. Shahzia Sikander's sculpture, NOW, represents an evolution of her recurrent motif of an allegorical female figure that embodies feminine strength and self-sovereignty. The work critically engages with and subverts traditional manifestations of patriarchal power, offering a nuanced discourse on gender and authority. Reimagining classical portraiture, Kehinde Wiley draws upon historic European miniatures, the artist conjures the grandiosity of the monumental paintings he is best known for and employs it on a miniature scale. Iran do Espírito Santo transforms an everyday light bulb into a minimalist sculpture using stainless streel and precise replication to investigate perception, light, and the tension between functional design and aesthetic contemplation. Joseph Kosuth’s oversized clock, inscribed with Gertrude Stein’s quote “If you can do it, why do it,” pursues the artist’s rigorous conceptual inquiry into the relationship between language and meaning.

John Baldessari juxtaposes fragmented photographic imagery and text, collapsing distinctions between the monumental and the mundane, questioning how meaning is constructed through shifts in visual and linguistic framing. Through an intensive process of transformation, Julian Charrière’s minimalist mirror repurposes silver from thousands of discarded black-and-white photographs, offering a poignant meditation on memory, preservation, and the recycling of rare minerals. In Laurent Grasso’s painting, an ominous cloud envelops a cityscape, merging imagery of the past, with contemporary phenomena extracted from one of his films. Yornel Martínez’s work imagines the Earth devoid of all countries and continents except for China. The absence of other countries for context emphasizes the perceived relationship between national and global scale. Anthony McCall’s drawing for an unrealized public artwork, Projected Column, blurs distinctions of scale as the modest drawing stands in for a monumental intervention never physically realized. Employing special software, Idris Khan scanned a reproduction of Leonard DaVinci’s masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, to analyze the volume of colors utilized in the original artwork. The ratio of each framed element corresponds exactly to the percentage of each color employed in the original painting.

Together, the works in The Audacity of Scale, offer a profound exploration of how artists employ scale to construct complex relationships between concept, meaning and perception. Bringing together widely ranging practices, the exhibition encourages the viewer to consider their own perception of scale, ranging from the intimate and personal to the expansive and monumental.