2017 Catalogue Archive

British painter Hurvin Anderson’s flattened landscapes and interiors are based on cultural places and memories from his childhood growing up in Birmingham, England, and his time in Trinidad. In several of his series, Anderson portrays the communal space of the Afro-Caribbean barbershops his father visited, focusing on Peter’s, a small shop located in an attic in someone’s home. Anderson sometimes paints the peculiar architecture of this barbershop – blue walls slanting back to two overlapping rectangles – as a lived-in interior setting, though here he emphasizes the ambiguity of the space by focusing on the abstract mass of angles and shapes obscured by patterning he paints onto the work’s surface. Anderson often features a distancing device, like the patterning in this work, to convey his emotional and physical distance from these spaces and his status as an interloper on the scene. Born in Birmingham to Jamaican immigrants, Anderson lives and works in London. He is currently shortlisted for Tate’s 2017 Turner Prize for his retrospective Hurvin Anderson: Backdrop at the Art Gallery of Ontario.