I D SMEAR

A SOLO SHOW OF PAINTINGS, ASSEMBLAGES AND SCULPTURE AND DIGITAL PRINTS BY ANDREW LITTEN

1. 
   
   

   

   
   
   
   
   
   Private View: Friday 8th November 6pm till late
   with drinks, delicious curry and music
   
   
   
   Exhibition continues:
   
   Saturday 9, Sunday 10, Thursday 14, Friday 15,
   Saturday 16, Sunday 17:
   
   12 mid-day to 5pm
   
   
   Andrew Litten’s work stirs from the groin – that place of raw bestiality and tenderest compassion. It is the place we all fear; a place of the extreme duality and conflicting, barely controllable urges – a bipolarity of our human beast within. Like so many expressionistic artists, Gorge Baselitz comes to mind, in Andrew’s work the rawness is also the vulnerability. Andrew is searching for poetry, the poetry of living, loving, hurting and dying; the vulnerable, the powerful, the human.
   

   
   

   But there is a continuity to Andrew’s work in duality, contradiction and opposition; 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 poetry of Louise Bourgeois, the master of interpreting our human beast within.

   
   

   Text by Jane Boyer

   
   

   
   

   For Litten, as a figurative artist representing the human form, the manipulation of materials and the manipulation of identity are intrinsically linked. Perhaps subversive, tender, malevolent, compassionate – pure expression, which is not political or demographic or defined by taste, is at the heart of it all.

   
   

   Creativity is empowering and empathy is powerful - and the need to see raw human existence drives it all forward.

   
   

   Andrew Litten   ID SMEAR