Alison Jacques presents a solo exhibition by Graham Little (b.1972, Dundee, UK) featuring new works made between 2025 and 2026. Working delicately with gouache on paper, Little constructs intricate paintings from carefully staged arrangements assembled in his studio using cut paper, found objects gathered from the streets around his home, friends posing as models and, occasionally, imagery drawn from books in his personal collection. Conceived over months–and often years–while Little’s interest in perceived beauty cannot be underplayed, his compositions are often characterised by the psychological blemishes that beauty cannot mask: distraction, disinterest and distance, emptiness cloaked in aesthetic sheen. As Little writes, ‘This show is less of a looking at beauty and more of a dismantling and looking around it.’
Long recognised for paintings that draw on the visual language of fashion photography, Little has explored beauty as both image and construction. Here, that investigation shifts. Rather than presenting beauty as the subject of the painting, these works consider the spaces around it: the objects, surfaces and gestures through which it is created, performed and observed.