![\"\"](\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Hurvin-Anderson-Rafting-2026-©-Hurvin-Anderson.-Courtesy-the-artist-Thomas-Dane-Gallery-and-VeneKlasen.-Photo-Richard-Ivey-1230x943.jpg\")
Hurvin Anderson’s lush though reserved paintings simultaneously communicate inclusion and exclusion, belonging and estrangement
\n\n\n\nVisitors familiar with the paintings of Hurvin Anderson will recognise the motifs and settings that punctuate his sprawling midcareer retrospective at Tate Britain, some of which have been mainstays of his practice since the late 1990s. One is the barbershop, which is plainly significant to him as a place of Black male sociability. Another is water, his canvases featuring beaches, lakes, rivers and swimming pools. He has consistently painted plant life – first trees and then, after a 2002 residency in Trinidad, the verdant undergrowth he saw there and in Jamaica. And he has sporadically revisited a found photograph of a fashionably dressed young woman, an image of the kind that migrants from the Caribbean sent to their families during the 1960s and 70s to assure them that they were finding their feet in Britain. Behind these recurrent elements is a cluster of related concerns: the legacies of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean and of postwar migration in the UK, also his ties to both places. For him, apparently, the memory of one colours the experience of the other.
\n\n\n\nThese concerns are mediated by brushwork that is inventive, often dazzling. He makes paint drip and slide, blister, coagulate, spurt and gather in pools. He gives it the consistency of grease one moment and silt the next. He experiments with different levels of density and transparency, and different kinds of touch. At times his handling is articulate in its scruffiness, as it is in paintings of boys standing around in a Birmingham park, such as Ball Watching (1997) and Ball Watching (Five-a-Side) (2010), scenes rendered in chalky patches of grey, blue and green that brilliantly describe the dullness of the light. The brushwork is more fluid in Jungle Garden (2020) and other recent paintings of vegetation swarming over derelict hotels in Jamaica. In these works, the painterly lushness threatens to dissolve the forms and volumes, leaving a powerful impression of brightness and humidity in colours that seem to seep through the canvas and linen surfaces.
\n\n\n\nAnderson wears his artistic affinities on his sleeve. He finds vital precursors in twentieth-century British painters Michael Andrews and Euan Uglow, apparently drawn to Andrews for his atmospheric effects and to Uglow for his compositional discipline. When working from a photograph or collage, he squares it up before reproducing it on a larger scale, occasionally leaving the grid visible in the final composition, as Uglow used to do. And there are clear nods here in two recent paintings of figures in canoes, Drifters (2026) and Rafting (2026), to Anderson’s onetime tutor Peter Doig, for whom the canoe has become a signature motif, though these luminous images dispense with the eerie overtones and air of magic that characterise the Scottish artist’s work.
\n\n\n\nAs the faint grids inherited from Uglow demonstrate, Anderson has a liking for patterns. In the barbershop scenes, he tessellates the images stuck on and around the mirrors, often turning them into blocks of unmodulated colour. On occasion, the pattern inserts itself between the viewer and the depicted view. In a couple of the paintings modelled on the found photograph of the young woman, Untitled (figure) (2006) and American Tan (Mrs. S. Keita) (2013), the leaf design on her dress floats free to form a kind of curtain in front of her. Anderson has added chain-link fences, bead curtains and security grilles over gardens and interiors in the Caribbean. In the show’s catalogue, Kobena Mercer persuasively maintains that these veils and barriers are Anderson’s way of signalling his outsiderhood, both as a Black man in still-racist Britain and as a British visitor in the Caribbean. At times they also suggest a willed apartness and an attempt to impose order, to contain the vitality of the natural world and the expansiveness of his own brushwork.
\n\n\n\nMany of the more arresting landscapes painted in the years after his residency in Trinidad, including Maracas II (2003) and Untitled (Red Flags) (2004), have a faintly oppressive grandeur, with their low horizon lines, heavy canopies of foliage and tonal dissonances. Neither exotic idylls nor images unambiguously reclaiming a lost heritage, these paintings convey a distinctive mix of heady sensory immersion and reserve.
\n\n\n\nAnderson’s rage at historical and ongoing injustices is occasionally explicit, as in Passenger Opportunity (2024–25), a mural-size, multiscene painting that includes images of enslaved men, the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in the UK, family reunions, political and sporting events, and tidy domestic interiors. Tracing lines of historical connection between the slave trade and the establishment of diasporic communities in modern Britain, it is a bold and absorbing work. But more often than not, Anderson’s political engagements are not front and centre. Rather, they are present, oblique but still readable, in his constant efforts to find ways of simultaneously communicating inclusion and exclusion, belonging and estrangement.
\n\n\n\nHurvin Anderson, Tate Britain, London, 26 March – 23 August
\n\n\n\nFrom the Summer 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
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