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… Andrew Litten’s art speaks with a much greater richness than my limited words allow on all of these poignant themes. Nail Biting is represented by a grotesque latex sculpture. Love making is depicted both in a large scale oil painting, called Sexual intercourse, and also as smaller and more intimate wax sculptures, Sitting and Copulate. A figure is shown Watering a Special Plant in a painting on an envelope. A boy holds his aeroplane proudly in the woodcut titled Boy with Aeroplane. A boy becomes a man in Liminal Stage, and Lost Lady battles with her sanity in a triptych of quickly sketched paintings on cardboard. Litten works across subject and media in a refusal to limit his output or to work formulaically in the name of quick success. Instead, he possesses the gift of foresight and - like the artists that the world remembers (Pablo Picasso and Louise Bourgeois to name but two) - acknowledges that life is made up of a paradoxical combination of deeply meaningful and utterly insignificant happenings and states of being. This particular exhibition also cleverly, and unlike most, shows work over the course of 20 years, rather than only a body of work taken from a short and isolated period. Through ‘Ordinary Bodies | Ordinary Bones’, Litten’s work is therefore appropriately viewable as a prolific oeuvre that extends beyond the parameters of a single show. Litten is considered as a striking innovator with an awareness that, in the words of Virginia Woolf, ‘masterpieces are not single and solitary births: they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice’…

 

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Ordinary Bodies, Ordinary Bones, 2014

 

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