On the occasion of Various Others, Munich’s unique take on a contemporary art festival, Littlewhitehead expose the affect of ideological landscapes on the human body.
(— Bear with, because I want to start with a far-out connection) entering Littlewhitehead’s (Craig Little and Blake Whitehead’s) fourth solo exhibition with Nir Altman (Munich), a particular painting comes to mind: Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow (1565). In that affective landscape, three hatted figures, pursued by a solemn pack of hunting dogs, plod through a snowy forest, their bodies slumped in a way to echo the mountainous decline before them. Something of an assemblage — Bruegel constructed his composition by piecing together disparate fragments from everyday life — The Hunters in the Snow is not a fiction per se nor a picture of reality either; narratively it rests somewhere in-between, as an allegory reflecting landscapes come to impress themselves upon human selves. Case in point, looking at the painting, we see the physical effect of the cold earth on Bruegel’s weary souls as well as sensing the metaphorical blues associated with the season — Bruegel’s hunters are empty-handed. Featuring a series of grey computer-aided paintings and a room-dividing-screen-like structure, adorned with three weathered hoodies, Littlewhitehead’s exhibition, Now the east wind hunts, refracts something of Bruegel’s work, making this spatial. Specifically, the affect of ideological landscapes — be these technological, sociocultural and/or political — on human bodies. Unlike Bruegel, Littlewhitehead’s work utilises human absence to make this affect coolly disquiet.
Furthering the duo’s previous use of digital painting processes, where images appear like absconded urban walls, each of the six paintings in this exhibition depict close-crops of bamboo plants — a stereotypical kind of imagery you might expect to see on a Japanese-style screen-saver, poster, or decorated object. Rather than being defined by painterly outlines, or through meticulous brushwork á la Bruegel, Littlewhitehead’s bamboo shoots are formed through protruding layers of pulped paper. Coloured with ambiguous mists of grey pigment, and the occasional plume of purple or pastel blue, these paintings look more like concrete reliefs than printed reproductions or a style of ‘painting’ we commonly know. It seems of note that the pair used a DIY painting machine to render these images, with the placement of each acrylic cloud directly relating to the colours in the original subject matter.
Wandering the gallery space in-between these disparately hung paintings, I get the feeling that I am walking through my own Bruegel-like forest (— light is fading, my abilities to see cropped short). This walk is unnerving; indeed, the longer I spend lost with and in these wintered trees the more out of place I feel. The lack of relation between each painting’s tactile surface and their colouration accentuates this. Here, dark tones are not used to create pictorial depth, to draw us into a composition, but sit as eerie shadows over each trunk, marring my abilities to access the promise bound in artist’s iconography — the effect is akin to peering at a picture through a water-damaged screen, a reality I know all too well (— I am lost in a forest, light is fading, and my phone is fucked, help). Read this way, Littlewhitehead sap the tranquil associations out of this Eastern subject matter, creating ghost images of the iconic, exposing how landscapes always have a second, more chilling, face.
The ravages of this second face are laid bare in Nest (2025) — a haggard room-dividing screen upon which the artists have hung three torn-up hoodies. Despite looking like a found object assemblage, built with stuff you could scavenge from public bins (we have all done it), the work has been carefully formed with reference to militaristic thinking and the uniforms worn by soldiers. Echoing the subdued colours in the exhibited paintings, each hoodie is a misty shade of pastel — bottle green, baby blue and peach. To dishevel these garments, as well as tearing holes and roughing seams, Littlewhitehead have applied magnesium sulphate, salt and vinegar, to their surfaces to give each a crumbly visuality — a material quality which makes each hoodie feel like a faceless statue — the weathered reminders of some long lost war. Strung up on thin wire hangers, I do not want to insinuate that Littlewhitehead are working with pathos here — they are not asking us to feel empathy for bodies at war. Nest exposes the cold realities of nationalist rhetoric and its impact on bodies — as we have seen far too often in recent years, the promises espoused by nationalist regimes ultimately lead to carnage on a human scale, not some brighter future for the polis. The battered room-divider, central to the sculpture, further alludes to the ravages brought by political landscapes which privilege division. As an object, it can be seen as both a privacy screen, something to change behind, and also a movable threshold, an arbitrary kind of enclosure. In this way, Nest manifests how nationalist landscapes operate, positioning human beings as disposable goods — flesh to dress a frame.
I realise I am working fast and loose with this review — from the landscapes of Bruegel to the ravages of nationalist ideology, trees to bamboo, three weary hunters to three wrecked hoodies. But is that not what all good art should aspire to: to hold different temporalities together, obliquely, in order to refract something of our worldly condition? Or at least to make the landscapes of our lives shudder. Shrouded in wintery associations, Now the east wind hunts makes me shudder with its cool criticality.
Littlewhitehead, Now the east wind hunts 9th May — 28th June 2025 Nir Altman, Munich
