Hurvin Anderson

RESEARCH ON HURVIN ANDERSON IN RESPONSE TO HULL TURNER PRIZE TRIP

Anderson was born in Birmingham in 1965, and was nominated for the Turner Prize 2017 aged 52, the direct year after the 50 year age lomit for nominations was removed. His work touches on subject matter surrounding his Jamaican heritage as well as as concepts of memory and identity. 'Anderson’s paintings flirt between abstraction and figuration, their tranquil scenes merging unstable ideas of memory, conjoined histories, and cross-culturalism.'

There is something elusive in his natural tree paintings which seem on the whole to defy direct critical response due to their suggestiveness. Michael Wilson of Time Out New York wrote; 'The tree paintings, for their part, occupy a space that is harder to define, a zone that endures beyond the explicitly urban identities and histories explored elsewhere in the show.' His development into a series of barbershop works however are more representational, capturing the interplay generated by the fusion of two cultures. 'Growing up in the central English city of Birmingham, which has a sizable Caribbean community, the artist became particularly interested in local barbershops. At those barbershops, he says, you always see portraits of the same black icons: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Marley and the Jamaican activist and author Marcus Garvey, whose influence on the next generation of civil rights leaders of the 1950s and ’60s can hardly be overstated. For Anderson, the portraits provided a link between Jamaica — its complex history of colonialism, slavery and political struggle — and a country that, when West Indians began emigrating there, saw them as “a problem.”. 
 
Geometry and shape are used repeatedly in Anderson's work, in one instance to create perspective, depth and geometry, roughly illustrating the architecture surrounding his subjects. However he also uses shape and geometry to suggest conceptual division and partition areas of his work. In 'Scumping' (right, 2013) Hurvin was inspired by memories of his brother scumping apples in Britain and mangos in the Carribean, yet the painting is lacking the grounding contextual element of his brother, and therefore becomes a half recalled memory, with a strong sense of dislocation. 

"Figures that don’t materialise are a recurring theme in Anderson’s paintings." Hurvin recalled in an interview with Apollo Magazine. "Ninety per cent of them,’ he says, ‘are meant to have a figure somewhere.'[...] He’s been trying to deal with complicated subjects, such as questions of identity and alienation, while keeping the work as open and interesting as possible."

This repeated sense of something absent is something I found really interesting. The dreamlike nature of these memory based recounts makes them feel fragmented, and the fact that key elements are obscured makes their interpretation a lot more subjective. Although I haven't been able to find any further details of this online, at the Ferens Gallery in Hull there was an information section which noted his use of transparent paper to position and layer compositions for his paintings. This was something in particular that interested me, as I think it is this constructed way of working that allows him to intuatively reduce his organic images back while still making them instinctively recognisable. I think this could be interesting to experiment with myself as could to allow more unexpected and experimental compositions to develop, while still allowing me the control and construction I enjoy working with.