The phrase "a small abstraction" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to a minor or simplified representation of a concept or idea.
Example: "In this paper, we will discuss a small abstraction of the complex theory to make it more accessible to readers."
Alternatives: "a minor abstraction" or "a brief abstraction".
My sculpture is a small bronze abstraction of my grandmother as a young woman bathing in a wheelbarrow.
Shoe-horned into a large closet, the intriguing display includes a wall-mounted wood file of material that might almost be a Graham sculpture and a small dark abstraction by Peter Demos, one of several artists who exhibited at Dan Graham.
There is also a fine selection of sculpture, including William King's "Pioneers," a witty variation on "American Gothic"; a group of bronzes by Calvin Albert Stanley Kearll's "Antenna Woman," inspired by Giacometti; and "Crescendo," a small, sinuous abstraction by Hans van de Bovenkamp.
Throughout there are deviations from modernism-as-usual: "Composition With Red Arrow," a small Popish abstraction from 1918 by the Romanian Dadaist Marcel Janco; a 1936-37 painting of (I think) brightly wrapped packages by Maria Elena Vieira da Silva that equivocates between magic realism and abstraction; and a wonderful little tropical fantasy by Leonora Carrington.
Paul Klee was arguably the last genius of small abstraction to be granted full-fledged membership in the Modernist canon.
Within a few years, she was making small abstractions covered with paint dripped in continuous, looping lines.
Small abstractions avoid the long realist tradition of painting as a window, and also the shorter, late-Modernist one of painting as a flat wall.
On West 21st Street, a small new gallery named Guided by Invoices (talk about sly) had been showing small abstractions on Masonite, enlivened by spurts of spray paint and rugged lines that appeared to be more sawed than incised.
Big has held center stage at least since Jackson Pollock; the small abstractions of painters like Myron Stout, Forrest Bess and Steve Wheeler are mostly relegated to the wings, there to be considered eccentric or overly precious.
