This is a big show of big paintings. Big, energetic, happy paintings which are just as enjoyable to stand in front of as one can imagine they were to make. Hurvin Anderson is the artist responsible, and the 80 paintings on show at Tate Britain amount to 30 years worth of work. Some date back to 1995 when he was an art student at the Royal College of Art; others were made this year (some he even finished off once they’d been hung).
‘Ball Watching’ hangs by the door, next to the entrance. Painted at art school, it captures a moment in Anderson’s youth living in Birmingham, the city in which he was born and raised after his parents emigrated from Jamaica. He and his friends would play football in Handsworth Park, often kicking the football into the lake – here, as the title suggests, they stand watching it. Compared with the sun-bleached, paint-dripped, tree-filled tropicana that fill the later rooms, the palette is darker, the figures less defined, the sky, rendered in broad brushstrokes, feels as though a foaming sponge has been dragged across a car windscreen.
The paintings do something similar for the viewer as they do for Anderson: they hold you between places
What it establishes, however, is what has kept Hurvin Anderson returning to the studio for three decades: the urge to paint his experience as a Black man of Caribbean heritage, born and raised in the UK. That sense of inbetweenness – belonging to two places, either side of the Atlantic – plays out through memories, what Anderson has described as ‘being in one place but thinking about another.’
That city park of his childhood with the ball is reimagined with a skyline dotted with Caribbean shipping vessels. Elsewhere, a Hindu temple encountered during a visit to Trinidad is drained of its vibrancy, its colour subdued as the greyness of London seeps into the palette. The exhibition moves between swimming complexes in Birmingham, barbershops in Jamaica, and country clubs in Trinidad. Time, too, folds in on itself. In a 1995 portrait of his sister, Bev, she appears twice – both as a girl and as an adult – then and now held within the same frame. Anderson paints each canvas as a moment stitched over with another, never fully settling into one place.
The final painting before you hit the gift shop shows a man perched on the trunk of a tree; its green, purple, and blue leaves sheltering him from the sun above, the light filtered down in dappled camouflage across the sand below. The painting is beautiful, the light is warm, and the colour is alive. The paintings do something similar for the viewer as they do for Anderson: they hold you between places. Stepping back out onto the street outside Tate Britain, it takes a moment to place yourself again—as though you’ve been carried somewhere else, if only briefly sharing in that condition of being in one place while thinking about another.
