Hurvin Anderson

Hurvin Anderson has created atmospheric landscapes and interior scenes for over 40 years. His paintings travel back and forth from the UK to the Caribbean, continually reworking the landscape traditions on both sides of the Atlantic.

Views that are thousands of miles apart collide with piercing light, moody vegetation and geometric grids. Anderson’s compositions play with our perception of space and time. They range from the intimate size of family snapshots to monumental landscapes that look across history. At the heart of his process are theevocative possibilities of paint – its textures, flows and colours.

Anderson was born in 1965 to Jamaican parents in Handsworth, Birmingham. He was the first in his family to be born in the UK after his parents emigrated. Growing up hearing stories of a distant homeland shaped his determination to capture the experiences of the Caribbean community. The park, the beach and the barbershop all recur in his layered explorations of memory, migration and belonging.

This exhibition is the first to survey the full range of Anderson’s work. It spans work he made as a student up to new paintings never exhibited before. The journey is not a linear one. It meanders between continents, and between past and present, as Anderson revisits his subjects time and again.

‘I define these paintings as wanting to see the Black vision. How we saw things was not quite the same. In Britain, your vision shrinks somehow. I want to broaden that out.’ Hurvin Anderson

Hurvin Anderson began painting from found photographs of family and friends in the 1990s. His early series on Caribbean homes in England often reimagines the figures in different settings or relationships The geographic distance between faraway family members collapses. Painting disrupts the apparent ‘truth’ of photography.

The experience of arrival in Britain resurfaces repeatedly in Anderson’s work from this point onwards. A black and white palette suggests the photographs of an earlier generation of migrants. Bursts of colour and fashion silhouettes evoke the 1970s and 1980s of his youth.

Anderson left Birmingham for London in the early 1990s, studying at Wimbledon School of Art and the Royal College of Art. He soon explored ways to subvert traditional landscapes and life drawing. By introducing abstract elements into his images, he blurred the boundaries of both his personal experiences and Black culture.

Certain memories from childhood keep a visual rhythm across Anderson’s decades of painting. From the trees that he climbed with friends in the park to a familiar patterned wallpaper, each image repeats with a different mood. Time loosens, giving way to light, form and colour.

A nighttime street corner. The electric light in a barbershop. The cold humidity of a public swimming pool. Although these memories are particular to Anderson, they also evoke experiences that many of us know.

Capturing the emotional quality of a place or moment is central to Anderson’s work. Rather than telling a story, his compositions are often painted with a certain mood in mind, such as longing, alienation or community.

Works like Ascension and Scrumping suggest tree-climbing and fruit-picking – romantic pastimes in rural England. But a darkness undercuts the beauty in Anderson’s landscapes.

Anderson’s recent work has shifted from personal memory towards a collective history. A large-scale painting across 16 panels, Passenger Opportunity has been reworked especially for this exhibition. It takes us back to post-war Jamaica as a generation set sail for Britain and, before that, to the horrors of transatlantic slavery across the Americas.

In 2002, Anderson undertook an artist’s residency in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, which shaped a new direction in his work. The visit inspired several series where clear views of landscapes or interiors are interrupted by fences, security grilles, vegetation and other barriers.

Techniques from across the history of painting – grids, cropped details and loose brushwork – also keep the viewer at a distance. We are immersed in colour and light, but at the same time never given full access.

These works build on ideas of belonging and exclusion that informed Anderson’s earlier scenes of Birmingham. They mark a shift in his focus, as he began exploring his complex relationship with the Caribbean, its colonial history and how its landscapes have been represented in the past.

Artists’ prints of harmonious tropical scenes once circulated internationally as propaganda for the plantation system, erasing the violent reality of enslaved people’s labour on the land. Since the rise of tourism in the 19th century, seductive 42 images of Caribbean beaches have promised luxury and escape. Anderson obstructs these easy ways of consuming the beauty of Trinidad and Jamaica.

Anderson has repeatedly revisited specific subjects in his work over many years. Through repetition, he refines their compositions and reflects on lingering questions. Each of the works in this room represents a different recurring theme in Anderson’s painting.

The artist’s close observations invite us to consider the act of looking and the position from which we see the world. The stillness of sitting on a veranda, a park bench or a barber’s chair contrasts with rapid glimpses from a moving car, a walk on the beach or a lively night out.

Within the frame of a painting, Anderson brings in other markers of visual experience, ranging from mirrors to magazine cuttings, photographs and film. Is It OK To Be Black? is overtly political, featuring the faces of civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Anderson unites their portraits on a barbershop wall, giving form to his long preoccupation with race, identity and the Black experience in Britain.

Anderson’s Jamaican hotel series recalls his walks along the island’s north coast. He depicts half-built and ruined hotel complexes overcome by towering plant life. Our gaze is directed inland, away from the Caribbean Sea and holidaymakers on the beach.

These landscapes unsettle the idealised postcard view of the Caribbean. The walls of vegetation that thrive in the region’s hot, wet climate appear ominous as well as beautiful, denying us a clear view. Anderson observes as nature itself seems to reclaim the land from human settlement. He also responds to a tension felt during his own visits to Jamaica, between being an insider and an outsider at the same time.

Anderson has said: ‘There’s a perception of the Caribbean and then there’s the reality, and I wanted to dig into the reality in some way. I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of a no man’s land, a kind of in-between space and what that might look like, what it might mean.’

Jamaica’s earliest hotels were inhabited by white visitors, who travelled there as part of an economy founded during slavery. Across the British empire, uncharted terrain away from the coast was described by colonisers as ‘the interior’. Anderson’s paintings contemplate these legacies, celebrating the land’s regrowth and resilience.

Four new paintings, created for this exhibition, form the culmination of Anderson’s exploration of memory and history. They have been conceived in two pairings, which speak to one another across the room. They reach across the span of the Atlantic world.

One pair began from historic photographs of 19th century Jamaica, a time of British colonial rule, slavery and abolition. Anderson grafts these found images onto an invented reminiscence from the early 20th century. A courting couple raft down a river, claiming space for themselves within the tropical landscape. Love and leisure become quiet acts of resistance.

Children climb an apple tree in England to pick the fruit. They look out, towards Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s arrival in Jamaica in 1966. Crowds greeted him. His visit led to global interest in the religious and political messages of the Rastafari movement. The aeroplane recalls the quiet scenes of arrival in England in Anderson’s early work.

The artist sees the future as finding form in fluid movements. He works through reminiscence, history and imagined scenes:

‘I’m interested in self-determination. It started with scrumping apples: this idea of kids in trees formulated something. What does it mean to have our own thoughts and ideas about how we live?’ Hurvin Anderson