Andrew Litten
Andrew Litten’s work explores raw human existence. He is searching for the poetry of living, loving, hurting, and dying through depicting the powerful, the vulnerable, and the human. His work articulates anxieties surrounding the fragility of life, unguardedly exploring complex states of our contemporary condition.
Litten wants to create “art that speaks of the love, anger, loss, personal growth and the private confusions we all experience in our lives.” He aims to ”create stories of authenticity that compress a sense of endurance of the human spirit.”
He dropped out of art college as a teenager, finding it restricting and claustrophobic. He was inspired at that time by commonplace subject matter and for a decade he created mostly small-scale works using humble domestic found objects (including envelopes, boxes and assembled furniture parts). The work made at this time deliberately challenged ideas of art elitism and art as commodity.
His recent work now includes large scale figurative paintings and sculpture. Through a multifaceted body of work characterised by a challenging intensity, Litten peels back civility to uncover animal instincts and fears, often forcing us to confront the uncomfortable. The power of renewal, change, hope and rejuvenation charge his emotively complex and visually poetic art.
Biography
Andrew Litten is a British artist, born in Aylesbury, 1970. He is self-taught and works from his studio in Fowey, Cornwall. He began exhibiting in 2002 with Dick The Dog and was then included in ‘Nudes’ at Galerie Pelar, New York City (along with Jacob Epstein and Pierre-Auguste Renoir) where his work was highlighted by a review in the New York Times. He exhibited in ‘No Soul For Sale’ at Tate Modern Turbine Hall 2010. Andrew has been included in numerous international curated mixed exhibitions including Berlin, Dublin, Siena, Milwaukee, New York City, Canberra and in Venice during the 54th Biennale. He was part of a British Painting tour of four major museums in China and one in Poland. He has held large-scale solo exhibitions at Spike Island and Motorcade FlashParade in Bristol, JD Malat Gallery in London and Anima Mundi in St Ives. He has been supported by The Arts Council, UK. DeQueeste Art, Belgium exhibited Andrew with Frank Auerbach and George Grosz in Radical Expression.
