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A s one of Britain’s most celebrated painters, Hurvin Anderson has produced a body of work that highlights, reflects and dissects his Jamaican heritage and Black British identity. Incorporating abstraction and figuration, he plays with the idea of memory, both individual and collective, to raise questions about what it means to belong to two cultures simultaneously, especially when one is suppressed and colonised by the other.
Anderson works from both photographs and his own memories to great effect – creating secondhand interpretations of firsthand experiences. This is evident in his sublime Lower Lake III, being sold in Sotheby’s upcoming Now Evening auction. One of a series of canvases depicting an island in the middle of Handsworth Park in Birmingham, where Anderson grew up, it is an expressive and multilayered work.
In it, the artist’s interpretation of a familiar park scene is filtered through a lens that washes it in watery pinks and fiery oranges juxtaposed with lush green foliage, creating an almost mercurial effect that reflects how Anderson blends the real and the remembered to create a version of the place that exists only within his work. As subject matter, Anderson’s choice of an island in the middle of a body of water in a Victorian park speaks to themes of belonging, detachment, accessibility and ownership. It reinterprets this landscape as a liminal space in which to consider the merging of cultures, the politics of leisure, the fluidity of identity and the unique sense of longing that characterises his practice.
Born to English parents of Jamaican descent, Hurvin Anderson is a second generation member of the Windrush generation who arrived in Britain from the Caribbean from the late 1940s to the mid 1960s and his work has often explored the intersections of place, personhood, identity, community and culture. Anderson received his MA from The Royal College of Art in 1998, where his professor was the Scottish figurative painter, Peter Doig, an important influence in Anderson’s work. Since then, he has exhibited at the Tate Britain in London and at the Michael Werner Gallery and Studio Museum Harlem in New York amongst many others.
As with Lower Lake III, he is known for depicting natural landscapes drawing both on his life in Britain and time spent in the Caribbean, where in 2002, he completed a Caribbean Contemporary Arts Residency Program in Trinidad. His use of rich and vibrant colour often builds in intricate, densely interwoven layers speaking to the multiplicity at play within his work. Alongside natural landscapes, Anderson has also returned time and again to specific interior scenes, most notably with his series depicting Black barbershops and in 2017, Anderson was nominated for the Turner Prize for solo exhibitions that included Is It Okay To Be Black? which features a barbershop interior adorned with portraits of important figures in Black history like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
Now, Anderson’s work is featured in the Life Between Islands exhibition, currently at the Tate Britain, alongside other artists of Caribbean heritage including Aubrey Williams, Donald Locke, Sonya Boyce, Claudette Johnson, Steve McQueen and Grace Wales Bonner. Exploring the relationship between the Caribbean and Britain through 70 years of art, the exhibition considers themes of decolonisation, the social and cultural significance of the home, sociopolitics, ancestry and the diasporic identity. It moves chronologically through works by artists who arrived in the UK from the Caribbean, to those who, like Anderson, were born in Britain covering collaborative, social and artists movements, experiences of racism and current Black and Caribbean life in Britain.
