NORTHAMPTON, MA.- The Smith College Museum of Art is pleased to announce Sized Up, an exhibition of rarely seen large-scale works from its permanent collection of paintings and works on paper. The exhibition will be on view through Sunday, September 10.

Sized Up explores how scale affects the power of the image in works drawn from the Museum’s collection of modern and contemporary paintings, prints, and drawings. The exhibition features 26 works of art that are arresting both because of their size and their content.

Included in the show are Nancy Spero’s multi-panel Acrobat, an elegant parabola of small collage elements on the extended empty space of the paper, and Chuck Close’s tour-de force portrait Lyle, a 147-color silkscreen. Sandy Skogland depicts the dentist’s office, instruments, and chair in unsettling orange and blue in her “super-sized” painting, Tools of _Expression. Yasuki Masako’s painting The Presence Between Things adopts the traditional Asian format of the folding screen to create a quietly abstract aerial view of a city.

Linda Muehlig, associate director of curatorial affairs and curator of paintings and sculpture said of the exhibition,

“These large works use their size to varied ends. In the case of the Skoglund painting, the large scale magnifies our shared fear of the dentist. If the work were smaller, the psychological effect would be greatly deminished. The collage elements of Spero’s Acrobat, on the other hand, are quite small, but the surface support is large, consisting of a number of panels. By ranging across a large surface with small-scale images, the artist exploits and claims the blank surface through fairly minimal means.”

Other highlights of Sized Up are artists Katherine Bradford’s Projector Painting and Neil Welliver’s Winter Stream. Also included is an abstract expressionist piece by Willy Heeks and a beautiful painting by the Chinese-born artist Hung Liu titled Judgment of Paris. Works by Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg, Elizabeth Murray, William Kentridge, and Richard Serra, among others, are also included.

The varied themes and media used in the works on view are tied together by their use of a large scale. Scale determines how much space the work of art commands, but also plays a part in how the work is perceived by the viewer. Size can be used to intimidate, challenge, or impress. The works in Sized Up all vary in scale and use their size to different effect.