Tate Britain, London
Anderson creates figurative paintings with a dreamlike intangibility, exploring his black British and Jamaican heritage with a startlingly fragile and unresolved intensity
Us and them, then and now, concrete and jungle, acceptance and rejection … Birmingham and Jamaica. Hurvin Anderson’s world is defined by clashing contrasts, by conflicts that can’t ever be resolved.
The British artist’s washed out, hazy, heat-drenched take on figurative painting is him trying to figure it all out, to make sense of a senseless world. That he doesn’t manage to – that you leave this big, affecting and often very beautiful retrospective at Tate Britain with more questions than answers – doesn’t mean he’s failed. The opposite, actually.
