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Miami Art Museums permanent collection provides food for thought and entices the visual palette.

Big Juicy Paintings (and More): Selections from the Permanent Collection is on view at MAM through Sept. 17, 2006. Curated by Peter Boswell, MAMs assistant director for programs/senior curator, the exhibition is drawn largely from MAMs permanent collection and supplemented with loans from area collectors.

And staying true to its title, the works in the show are, indeed, big. At 40 feet long, theres no doubt that Arturo Herreras When Alone Again III is a big painting. So, too, is Enrique Martinez Celayas 14-foot-tall portrait of painter Leon Golub. While these works are among the highlights of the exhibition, the 70-plus works on display provide plenty of visual proof that bigger may indeed be better.

MAMs collection is growing so rapidly that visitors to the exhibition will see a show that is bigger and juicier than we could have imagined even six months ago, Boswell said. The exhibition includes a number of new acquisitions, including Fernando Boteros Still Life, Fabian Marcaccios From Raging Aggression to Decoration, and groups of recently donated works by Joseph Cornell and Purvis Young. It also includes paintings familiar to MAM visitors, such as Morris Louis Beth Shin, Gerhard Richters Abstraktes bild and Frank Stellas Chodrow II.

Although most of the works in Big, Juicy Paintings are indeed big, Washington Color School painter Gene Davis will be represented by works on two vastly different scales, demonstrating his witty response to the massive canvases that prevailed in much mid-20th-century artwork. Joining the artists large Blue Freak-out will be one of MAMs most recent acquisitions and by far the smallest work in its collection, Davis Micropaintingwhich is less than 1/2-inch square.

The exhibition also includes paintings by established masters such as Francesco Clemente, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Susan Rothenberg and Sean Scully. A number of works by artists with strong South Florida ties, including Carlos Alfonzo, José Bedia, Tomás Esson, Teresita Fernández, Lynne Golub Gelfman and Robert Thiele are on view as well.

A sculptural component includes large-scale installations by Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Edouard Duval Carrié, Nancy Graves and Chris Macdonald.