Skarstedt's Paris gallery has opened Petits Formats, a group exhibition that defends the modestly sized artwork against the long reign of the monumental canvas. On view from 19 October to 19 December 2026, the show gathers fourteen artists who spent significant parts of their careers in Paris and sets their smaller works side by side, arguing that intimacy of scale can bring an artist's thinking into sharper focus rather than diminishing it.

The figurative half of the hang moves from a 1908 Picasso head, in which several viewpoints are compressed into a single small face, to a Giacometti portrait of his brother Diego from around 1954, where the marks of daily studio labour are scored into the surface. Georges Rouault's Flowers of Evil from 1945 to 1946 brings the heavy black outlines of his training in glass painting to a female figure, while Edouard Vuillard's salon scene from around 1905 captures his dealer and muse in a buzzy domestic interior. Andre Masson's work from August 1940 and Max Ernst's 1936 Garden of Eden turned jungle extend the figurative thread into the tensions of wartime Europe.

The abstract works make a parallel argument about invention under constraint. Nicolas de Stael's 1947 Composition, painted while he worked in cramped quarters, drives thick impasto across a canvas of just twenty-four by nineteen inches. Yves Klein's 1961 Fire Painting sets a ghostly monochrome surface against the destructive process that made it, while Henri Michaux's Mescaline drawing from 1956 records a swirling, drug-induced perception in black lines on beige paper, and Yves Tanguy's 1940 landscape fuses land and sky in the year after his emigration to America.

Taken together, the selection suggests that small formats let artists test ideas quickly, distil signature motifs and invite close looking of a kind that vast canvases can discourage. For visitors moving between the fair booths and museum halls of Paris art week, the show offers a counterweight: a reminder that a career's essence can fit within a frame held at arm's length, and that scale, handled deliberately, is itself a creative decision.