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 caries 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’s 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 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 for 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.