Andrew Litten

Andrew Litten (b.1970, UK) is self-taught artist, currently working in his studio in Fowey, Cornwall. Andrew Litten’s work explores raw human existence. He is searching 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 through a multifaceted body of work; this includes large scale figurative paintings, bronze sculpture, and mixed media work, created using everything from gouache and oil paint to hair and screws.

 

Litten’s base aim is to define issues of contemporary social conditioning and private confusion, and place this within a wider humanistic context. He wants to create “art that speaks of the love, anger, loss, personal growth and the private confusions we all experience in our lives. 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 is inspired by the commonplace, stimulated by the many works in his studio and by the activity of art making, assembling, collaging, scoring texture into surfaces, and manipulating the material qualities of paint. His portraits are characterised by a challenging intensity, used to represent dependence, breakdown, faith, mourning, and responsibility. Litten peels back civility to uncover animal instincts and fears, it forces us to confront the uncomfortable.