The Complete Art Placement Guide

Placement is mostly arithmetic, not instinct — a handful of numbers that, followed consistently, make almost any painting look considered.

Height

Centre the piece at roughly 145–150cm from the floor to its midpoint — the standard museum eye-level convention, and one that works in most residential ceiling heights too. Above furniture, leave 15–25cm of clearance between the top of a sofa or console and the base of the frame; tighter than that and the piece looks like it's resting on the furniture rather than hanging above it. The full mechanics of fixings and weight-rated hardware are covered in the [installation guide](/installation-guide).

Width

A painting should fill roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of the width of the wall or furniture piece it relates to. Narrower than that and it reads as an afterthought; wider and it starts to crowd the architecture around it.

Negative space is part of the composition

The empty wall around a piece isn't wasted space — it's what lets the eye land on the work at all. Resist the urge to fill every remaining gap with smaller pieces; a single painting with room to breathe almost always reads as more considered than a wall with no visual rest at all.

Framed or unframed

Deep-edge, gallery-wrapped canvases can hang unframed for a clean contemporary line, or float in a slim frame for definition against a busy wall — see [Framing vs Unframed](/blog/framing-vs-unframed-contemporary-canvas-art) for the trade-offs. For a piece sized to a specific wall from the outset, a [commission](/commission) removes the guesswork; [Textured Abstract Paintings](/collections/textured-abstract-paintings) is a good starting point for scale reference.