Graham Little

Alison Jacques presents a solo exhibition of new work by Graham Little (b. 1972, Dundee, UK), on view in the Upstairs Gallery. The exhibition coincides with Little’s inclusion in ‘Mixing it Up: Painting Today’ (9 September–12 December 2021), a landmark survey of British painting at Hayward Gallery, London, curated by Ralph Rugoff, and follows the publication of Little’s first major monograph, Inside the water sleep (2019), featuring essays from Martin Herbert and Laura Smith.

Graham Little’s compositions – often domestic, often dreamlike, always delicate – ask what it is to live in relation: to oneself, one’s companions, one’s era; to the felt qualities of the physical world. With this new series of vignettes on paper, many of which took years to build from conception to completion, Little adopts the aesthetics of fashion photography and Baroque grandeur to set in place a series of tense oppositions, each of which is combined in just balance: beauty and decay, emptiness and presence, animate bodies and the spaces they occupy. ‘There is the surface of things’, writes critic Martin Herbert of Little’s work, ‘and then, as uncovered with the passage of time, what lies behind.’