Andrew Kötting was born in Elmstead Woods in 1959. After some early forays into market trading and scrap-metal dealing he travelled to Scandinavia to become a Lumberjack. He returned home in the 80’s to study at Ravensbourne College and then at the Slade, London. He currently lives and works between Hastings in England and Fougax-et-Barrineuf in the forests of the French Pyrenees. He teaches part-time at the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury where he is Professor of Time Based Media.
In the UK he has had retrospectives of his work at Tate Britain, ICA and the NFT and in Europe at Oberhausen, Osnabruck, Hamburg, La Rochelle, Rotterdam, Paris and Cork. 2016 saw a 6 week retrospective of his films at Cinema Nova in Brussels, the release of two short animated films in collaboration with his daughter Eden and a multi media arts project Edith made with Iain Sinclair, Jem Finer, Claudia Barton, David Aylward and Anonymous Bosch.
Andrew Kötting is one of Britain’s most intriguing artists, and perhaps the only film-maker currently practising who could be said to have taken to heart the spirit of visionary curiosity and hybrid creativity exemplified by the late Derek Jarman. His twenty year oeuvre to date has moved from early live-art inflected, often absurdist pieces, through darkly comic shorts teasing out the melancholy surrealism at the heart of contemporary Englishness to seven resolutely independent feature films that take landscape and journeys as the springboards for visually striking and structurally inventive enquiries into identity, belonging, history and notions of community. It is his openness and outlaw intelligence and compelling wit that marks out his work as both vital and important. www.andrewkotting.com
Gareth Evans, Curator, Whitechapel.
ALPHABETARIUM OF KOTTING 2020