Big Art Small Art

Book excerpt: Brilliantly innovative artists revolutionizing traditional approaches to art through an exaggerated use of scale Scale is being taken to new extremes in art: from Luke Jerram’s microbiological clear-glass sculptures and Klari Reis’s petri dish paintings, to Lilian Bourgeat’s oversized furniture and stemware and Janet Echelman’s 230-foot-long aerial sculpture that was installed over the Amstel River in Amsterdam. Art lovers are forced to examine these massive or tiny works through a new perspective. Featured here are forty-five cutting-edge artists from around the world who are revolutionizing our approach to scale in art, using crafted or found objects, unusual materials, texture, color, and patina to create a sense of wonder in which we think afresh about function, appearance, beauty, and aesthetics. The book is divided into two sections: Big Art and Small Art. The artists showcased are innovative in their choice of materials, which include plastic bags (Pascale Marthine Tayou) crayons and pencils (Diem Chau), leaves (Lorenzo Manuel Durán), inflatables (Choi Jeong Hwa),and digital media (Yang Yongliang). Stylishly designed and highly accessible, this is the first book to bring together in one volume the very best examples of big and small art of the twenty-first century.