Hurvin Anderson’s luminous palette

Growing up in Britain’s ‘second city’, switching between my parents’ houses in the north Birmingham districts of Aston and Handsworth, I had little sense that I was living in areas as culturally rich as they were socio-economically deprived. It was a disconcerting experience in January of this year to sit alongside a sold-out audience at the Spanish Film Institute in Madrid and watch Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah, 1986), a documentary on the September 1985 riots which disrupted my first week at primary school.

Born in Handsworth in 1965, the artist Hurvin Anderson, now the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Britain, was the youngest of eight children. He was also the first not to be born in Jamaica, his parents having migrated to the UK in the early 1960s. On the one hand, Anderson, who had his first show at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery in 2013, is a respected and renowned figure. Shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2017, his portrait of a leisure centre swimming pool, Audition (1998), sold at Christie’s for over seven million pounds at auction in 2021. Conversely, I am not alone in having undervalued his significance. Truth be told, it was a pleasant surprise to chance upon his work in 2024 at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami – for which he had completed a new 16-panel monumental painting, Passenger Opportunity (inspired by Carl Abrahams’ murals at Kingston’s Norman Manley International Airport) – and later to discover that Lincoln College, Oxford, had commissioned him to complete a tapestry for their 600th anniversary.

Anderson requested that Handsworth Songs be screened at the entrance to his retrospective at Tate Britain. For those who attended at the beginning of the run, another fitting and complementary installation was the Tate’s recent blockbuster Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals show on a lower floor. Anderson’s palette may be more luminous and vibrant, but his works draw inspiration from and enter into dialogue with a long tradition of British landscape paintings. Decades before large properties were sub-divided into bedsits, Handsworth was considered well-to-do, and he captures a bucolic side of the area rarely reflected in news reports. Hung by the door as visitors enter is Ball Watching 1 (1997), painted at art school. It was inspired by a photograph of the artist as a child playing football with friends around the lake in Handsworth Park where my father took me to ride my bike. In Scrumping, Anderson offers the incongruous image of a mango hanging from an apple tree to juxtapose the fruits that a figure representing his brother shook from trees in Jamaica and England.

Comprising more than 80 artworks spread across six rooms, the exhibition is lightly curated. Not all exhibits match the standard or scope of keynote inclusions such as Audition, but the crucial counter-argument to criticism of uneven quality control and slapdash hanging is that the exhibition’s principal goal is to introduce the vast oeuvre of one of Britain’s greatest living artists to visitors, many of whom will be encountering the works in a museum setting for the first time.

Arranged in loosely chronological order, the earliest painting on display is of his sister Bev (1995) – in which a portrait of her as a young woman is placed next to an image of her as a child. Four new works – addressing colonialism, memory, Rastafarianism and migration – were created specifically for the exhibition.

In 1948, an advertisement in an English-language newspaper in Kingston announced opportunities to travel on HMT Empire Windrush to seek employment and a reputedly better life in the United Kingdom. Many of Anderson’s works draw on photographs, with Passenger Opportunity – the centrepiece of Room Two and arguably the exhibition as a whole – drawing on images sent home by emigrants travelling on Windrush (a metonym for an entire generation) to Britain.

Over the course of the exhibition, themes come in and out of focus with Anderson’s multiple portraits of barbershops, for instance, spread across different rooms. A before and after moment in Anderson’s personal and professional life was a residency at Trinidad’s Caribbean Contemporary Arts in 2002. Although he first travelled to Jamaica in 1979 as a young teenager, he felt disconnected and something of an outsider, a feeling he claims only to have overcome in the 21st century. The greater pull of his works set in Birmingham as opposed to the Caribbean on my imagination likely has to do with my own journey growing up in and around Jamaican communities, without ever belonging to them. Cabinet (1997) – a Matisse-inspired oil painting that puts an Afro-Caribbean spin on traditional English parlour portraits – took me straight back to my babysitter’s living room, filled with china, photographs and treasured objects.

Hollywood Boulevard (1997), a rare instance of self-portraiture, depicts a young Hurvin standing next to his father in their finest clothes in front of a pub (resembling the Crompton Arms, a breeding ground for such bands as Steel Pulse and the Beat). Within the painting, a black cowboy (taken from the 1937 film Harlem on the Prairie) materialises in a cloud between the two figures, denouncing the scarcity of black role models in mainstream culture. Warhol’s Brillo Boxes are refashioned along Caribbean lines in Mother’s Chicken, two hand-painted acrylic boxes. Various portraits such as Mrs S Keita (2008) – which stress the importance of self-presentation and personal style – evoke that old Mod adage about the dignity of clean living under difficult circumstances.

Audition showcases an early exuberance of colour, anchored by geometrical precision and discipline, that characterises much of Anderson’s most accomplished and ambitious work. In Country Club: Chicken Wire (2008), I had to look twice to ascertain that said wire had been painted and was not in fact real-life wire placed in front of the canvas. Given his predilection for vivid colour schemes, Caribbean landscapes play to Anderson’s strengths and sensibility. Lush nature envelops the brightly clothed figure in Grace Jones (2020) – it was unclear to me whether this was a portrait of the singer, actress and model of the same name. While it does not resemble the star, Anderson is hardly a realist painter, and Jones speaks at length in her autobiography of the lush Jamaican countryside. 

Nature is not, however, available to everyone, and paintings such as Hawksbill Bay (2020), depicting a derelict but once-exclusive Jamaican beachfront hotel, are politically charged, showcasing landscapes associated with wealthy, often white, patrons. Anderson’s penchant for barbershop scenes, meanwhile, cannot be separated from their status as all too rare spaces in which black individuals and groups relax and feel at home.

That an artist as accomplished as Anderson should reach his sixties before receiving an exhibition of the stature his work deserves is a salutary reminder not to fall into complacency.

Hurvin Anderson is at Tate Britain until 23 August 2026.