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Hurvin Anderson has earned a well-deserved reputation “as one of Britain’s most skilful and genuinely experimental painters”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Born to Jamaican parents in Handsworth, Birmingham, in 1965, Anderson “is big on artistic virtues we like to think of as typically British: emotional reticence and a doggedly patient focus on what’s in front of him”. He often returns to the same subjects: Black-owned barbershops, lush Caribbean forest-scapes, drab English suburbia.
Whatever he paints, it is always characterised by a certain sense of “detachment, even alienation”. People, if they figure at all, are generally “seen from a distance or behind or deliberately blurred”. The paintings are highly atmospheric, frequently radiating a sense of menace or melancholy – they have the air of fading memories. This “fascinating” retrospective at Tate Britain is Anderson’s biggest exhibition to date, bringing together around 80 paintings from every stage of his career. It is “an absorbing survey of an undoubtedly significant figure”. Anderson is a figurative painter in the great tradition of Bacon, Freud and Auerbach. “The linking factor is a commitment to developing his craft” that is “quite humbling”.
Anderson’s work is defined by tensions, said Laura Freeman in The Times. He constantly “pulls this way and that”, between realism and romanticism, between Britain and the Caribbean, between past and present. A major presence in these pictures is Jamaica itself: he didn’t visit until he was a teenager, and says he struggles with his “romantic” conceptions of his parents’ homeland. Yet the Jamaica we see in his paintings “isn’t the Sandals fantasy of holiday adverts”. Rather, it’s “a place of rank overabundance, hot soil and hotter concrete”. Somehow, Anderson manages to conjure the humidity of the place, hitting you “with the sinister oppression” of tropical heat. But he can be uneven, too: for every “stunner” like “Wait a Moment” (2019), a virtuosic treatment of “shifting shadows on white sand”, there’s a misfire. And too often, the Tate’s “cavernous” galleries seem to dwarf the hang.
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“Quality control could have been tighter,” said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. A number of Anderson’s best paintings have been omitted in favour of “sludgy, hesitant” smaller works. Even so, there’s no shortage of “striking compositions”: “Maracas III” (2004), for instance, sees “a hazy Caribbean vista”, painted as if it were “the crystallisation of a memory”, in which tiny figures “are dwarfed by sinuous palm trees”. His complex feelings about his heritage are clear in a series of Trinidadian landscapes interrupted by barriers “such as security grilles and wire fencing, so that the viewer feels excluded”. All in all, this is a “transfixing” show. I left it “enchanted by the pensive, yearning atmosphere that’s peculiar to Anderson’s art”.
