The Brooklyn Rail

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.

Little is known for interweaving visual quotations from 1970s and ’80s fashion photography with art-historical allusions. In a text that accompanies his exhibition at FLAG, critic Hettie Judah compares the figure in collegiate attire standing in front of a merchandise shelf in Untitled (Boutique) (2019) to a Roman sculpture, and indeed, there are hints of Polykleitos’s marble Spear-Bearer (c. 450–440 B.C.E.) in the man’s smooth face. In Untitled (2008), a work in colored pencil, watercolor, and gesso, a woman models a gridded sweater with color blocks that vaguely resemble the abstract compositions of Mondrian. In Untitled (Parlour) (2014), a figure pours tea in front of a red wall. By dressing her in a red turtleneck that causes her body to blend into its surroundings and an apron that matches her tablecloth, Little crosses the red interiors of Matisse and Vuillard with the saccharine sentimentality of Norman Rockwell. More analogies to sources ranging from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Anthony van Dyck, Vermeer, Caspar David Friedrich, and Vogue to Medieval painting; Dürer’s nature studies, Bernini, Whistler, and Hockney are all available in Little’s eclectic oeuvre. The pleasures of intertextuality manifest so readily before his subtle pastiches that one can get carried away with speculation.

But Little seems more interested in exploring patterns of perception and historical memory than in conforming to any lineage or canon. Although faces in his works are blank, his figures’ bodily gestures—a raised arm, a cocked hip, a bent back—convey the kinds of broadly comprehensible emotions that the German art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) observed in the visual record and attempted to illustrate in his Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–29). Only photographs remain of the “atlas,” but it consisted of sixty-three panels on which Warburg arranged 971 images of cultural artifacts from antiquity through the twentieth century. He showed how, for instance, a figure seated in profile with a raised knee appears across Raphael and Marcantonio Raimondi’s Judgment of Paris (ca. 1510–20), Hans Sebald Beham’s Fountain of Youth and Bathhouse (1536), and Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and argued that the recurrence of forms and gestures, often after periods of suppression, sheds light on the connections between social memory, collective imagination, and emotional communication throughout history. In this sense, a Mondrian composition transformed into a sweater design is not a diminished original but an indication of a formal and emotional impulse insinuating itself across time and space.

At FLAG, Little’s works demonstrate this complex interplay between form and cultural association. In Untitled (Bridge) (2022), the curve of a guardrail against which a vagrant rests, staring at distant mountains, mirrors that of the archway in Untitled (Mountain) (2021), which looks out over a similar landscape. The recurrence of the form gives Little’s pictorial universe a sense of rational order and seems to speak to a cultural obsession with framing and containing the sublime. Untitled (Ball) and Untitled (Bedroom) (both 2021) both feature surreal white spheres in their mises en scène. In Untitled (Ball), the sphere is large enough to eclipse the stooped woman, while in Untitled (Bedroom), the same form is the size of a ping-pong ball held between the fingers of a bare-chested man. Smooth and untarnished, the sphere would appear alien and anachronistic in any environment, yet when glimpsed across multiple works, it reminds us of our ability to coexist with unknowns.

The rhyming images here reveal as much about viewers’ interpretive inclinations as they do about Little’s expressive tendencies. To read these pictures in terms of imitation or homage is to suppose that history is being consumed in service of the present. Thinking of their visual patterns as the surfacing of shared impulses allows us to recognize images not as commodities but as co-conspirators in the construction of our emotional worlds.