Andrew Litten British, b. 1970

  • Overview
    I want to create emotively led art that speaks of the love, personal growth, anger, loss and the private confusions we all experience. Perhaps subversive, tender, malevolent, compassionate – the need to see raw human existence drives it all forward.
    ANDREW IS A (MAINLY) SELF-TAUGHT ARTIST

    Andrew Litten can be considered an ‘Outsider’. Self-taught and working away from the mainstream, his practice is raw, uncooked and unadulterated by culture.

     

    His work exposes the raw, visceral identity of the human subconscious. He strips bare the protective facade of the seemingly mundane and ordinary, revealing our deepest fears attached to love, angst, sadness and identity.  Like voyeurs, we are happy to look in on the frailties of others, but at the same time, we are forced to confront the idea that, in essence, we are observing ourselves. This duality provokes both attachment and repulsion in equal measure.

    Recent work has established strong humanistic themes such as social alienation, drug use, ageing and other wide-ranging identity disturbance issues.  As well as working with traditional media (canvas and paper), Litten is well-known for his use of found objects and other materials to heighten and emphasise the visual.

    Much sought after, both in the UK and abroad, his work is owned by Anthony Petullo, one of the foremost collectors of ‘Outsider’ art in the United States.

    We have a body of early work (1990-2007) available for sale with prices from £1,000. Please enquire for further information.

  • Works
  • Press

    Andrew Litten’s work explores raw human existence. Andrew is searching for poetry, the poetry of living, loving, hurting and dying; the vulnerable, the powerful, the human. His work carries extreme experience, passion and flippancy, allure and repulsion. These qualities and Andrew’s sense of purpose have been influenced by the powerful poetic art of Louise Bourgeois, the master of interpreting our human beast within.

    Dr Jane Boyer, academic researcher, writer, artist-curator
     
    Art is a bad liar. Many contemporary painters aspire to a raw, self-taught aesthetic, but their rawness quickly reveals itself as cooked-up. Litten bears the stamp of authenticity. The meanings of his images may be elusive, but they work on our feelings because they are felt.
    Laura Gascoigne, independent arts writer, including The Spectator, The Tablet, Jackdaw
     
    Litten’s paintings have always confronted the viewer with the psychological weight and emotional intensity of the physical world, suffused with the darkness that can run through life, but now there s also a feeling of lightness as if these weighty forms have been permeated by the weightlessness of atoms, liberated by movement and transformed by a new luminosity.
    Dr Richard Davey, research fellow in the School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University. Art essays include Anselm Kiefer for the Royal Academy of Arts
     
    Litten’s influences range from Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Pierre Bonnard to Francis Bacon, Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois. Like Bourgeois, Litten mines pain to vivifying effect, and it becomes a force for connection. “Through these works, I seek to create stories of authenticity and to explore the part of us that wants to care – to compress a sense of endurance of human spirit,” Litten says.
    Sophie Hastings, freelance features writer, including Observer, The Gentlewoman, GQ, ARTnews
     
    Litten’s expressionist paintings challenge engagement. Complex, varied and layered, they reach into the human condition and draw out the viscera of mind states: depression, sex, dependency, anger, fear, all our most private corners are opened. The pictures are exciting and calming at the same time because they seek to reveal the mind, not really the artist’s but somehow the looker’s, and explain.
    Simon Tait, freelance arts and features writer for The Independent, The Times, the Evening Standard and FT
  • Biography

    Biography

    SOLO EXHIBITIONS
    2023    Not Forgotten (Early Work 1990-2007) Patrick Davies Contemporary Art
    2023    Connect, JD Malat Gallery, London 
    2021    Fragile Together, JD Malat Gallery, London

    2020    Something is Wrong, De Queeste Art, Abele/Watou, Belgium
    2020    Concerning the Fragile, Anima Mundi, St Ives
    2018    Ordinary Bodies, Ordinary Bones, Anima Mundi, St Ives
    2017    Need, Patrick Davies Contemporary Art
    2014    I Wish you Ill and Hope you Suffer as Much as I Have, Spike Island Test Space, Bristol
    2013    ID Smear, Motorcade / FlashParade, Bristol
    2012    Guest, L-13 Light Industrial Workshop, London
    2011    This is Real, Oo Gallery, New York
    2011    Wrong Art, in association with RSA New Contemporaries, RSA, Edinburgh
    2008    Paintings, Goldfish, Penzance
    2007    Connect?, Goldfish, Penzance 
    2006    Free Range, Goldfish, Penzance
    2005    Ordinary Bodies, Goldfish, Penzance
    2005    I Trust you Implicitly, Gallery Pellar, New York
    2004    Something Happened, Hilsboro Fine Art, Dublin
    2004    Objects of Subjective Interpretation, Dick The Dog, Penzance
    2003    I Think I was Just Talking to Myself, Dick The Dog, Penzance

    SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
    2013    This Me of Mine - Identity in the Digital Age, UK touring exhibition and symposium
    2011    With WW Gallery at the Venice Biennale, Venice
    2010    No Soul for Sale, Tate Modern (Turbine Hall), London