Earl of Clancarty reviews ‘Hurvin Anderson’ at Tate Britain

2008: ‘Country Club: Chicken Wire’ | Private Collection. © Hurvin Anderson. Image courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo: Richard Ivey.

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From the start of this retrospective of 40 years’ work, it is clear that Hurvin Anderson’s main interest lies in his own upbringing and heritage, and how the different aspects of that heritage might fit together. What is fascinating is that they don’t: there is no resolution, rather different parts of that heritage sit awkwardly beside each other, or are layered on top of each other, in a kind of dualistic conflict.

Anderson, born in Handsworth, Birmingham, to Jamaican immigrants, grew up in what was both an English and multi-cultural environment. The earliest paintings – influenced by family photos – are largely black and white figurative studies, although he is already thinking about the Caribbean his parents left behind. An early breakthrough work is Ball Watching (1997), itself based on a photo he took of boyhood friends with their backs to us looking out at a lost football floating on the lake in Handsworth Park. But he has already turned the lake into a seemingly warm sea and put ships on the horizon, while the football itself has disappeared.

In another work looking back at this Birmingham childhood Grove Lane (2000), the swimming bath cubicle doors painted in artificial colours don’t erase the grimy grey of the concrete surroundings – just as lovingly rendered by the artist.

On a first visit to Jamaica, his reaction was one not of ‘homecoming’ but of dislocation. As Anderson says: “My struggle with Jamaica: I don’t know it and I know it. I have this romantic vision of it and a lot of my painting is fighting that romance.”

It is exciting to see the artist’s development

Interestingly, then, Anderson describes his painting process (which soaks up many influences from the LP covers of Jamaican artist Ras Daniel Heartman, to John Constable and Anderson’s mentor the British artist Peter Doig) as a search for what his autobiographical work “should be”. That “should” is instructive. For instance, Maracas III (2004), a painting of the popular beach spot in Trinidad (where Anderson had a residency) feels simultaneously like a fragmented memory, and – with its sketchy figures – an idealised projection into the future, like an architectural plan. Counterintuitively, too, our attention is, as with other of the Caribbean pictures, drawn away from the tourists’ beach to the lush island interior.

That interior is there too in the wonderful Limestone Wall (2020), where an abandoned Jamaican hotel (part of the colonial legacy) is gradually being swallowed up by the forest.

It is exciting to see the artist’s development, for instance from the more obvious geometric obstruction of what is felt to be unreachable (or out of bounds) as in Country Club, Chicken Wire (2008) to the subtle use of squaring-up lines which weave in and out of the painting, as in the brilliant Siding (2013) seen in the first room of the exhibition.

The accompanying catalogue has interesting essays, though not quite enough information about the individual works themselves. The illustrations, perhaps inevitably, do not do justice to the intensity of work that has to be experienced first-hand to be fully appreciated.

Earl of Clancarty is a Crossbench peer

Hurvin Anderson

Curated by: Dominique Heyse-Moore and Jasmine Kaur Chohan

Venue: Tate Britain until 23 August