Graham Little
Jenny Wu, The Brooklyn Rail
April 2024
The figures in Graham Little’s works on paper—sixteen of which are spread across four rooms at the FLAG Art Foundation—all appear to be posing in service of an external gaze, even those who are engrossed in reading, stretching, and pouring tea. In Lounging Lady (2009), a colored pencil and gouache piece, the viewer opens the door to a room to find a suavely dressed woman sprawled on a bare mattress. The tincture of violence in the shadows that frame her raised arms and crossed legs calls to mind the supine models in Chris von Wangenheim’s fashion editorials. In Untitled (Ball) (2023), rendered in gouache, a woman is bent over, gathering a white duvet from the floor in a nondescript and decidedly nonfunctional interior dominated by a large sculpturesque sphere, her expression hidden behind a curtain of curly red hair. The scene bears a touch of Guy Bourdin in its surrealism, as well as in the way it prioritizes the figure’s legs over her face. […]