b. 1970, United Kingdom
Andrew Litten is a British artist, born in Aylesbury, 1970. He is self-taught and currently works from
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.