Jamaican Nostalgia

In 2021, his painting Audition, a large canvas painted in 1998 that represents a group of people in a swimming pool seen from above, was sold for 7.4 million pounds at Christie's, establishing itself as one of the most expensive paintings ever sold by a living black artist in the world. However, the consecration for Hurvin Anderson comes today with this major exhibition at Tate Britain. The fruit of twenty-five years of research, Hurvin Anderson's first solo exhibition brings together over sixty paintings by the British artist, ranging from nostalgic interiors to saturated landscapes, through a profound reflection on identity and belonging. Born in Birmingham to Jamaican parents of the Windrush Generation, Anderson explores the sense of being "between two worlds" through painting. His works, often inspired by photographs, reproduce Caribbean barbershops in London and Jamaican environments, merging abstraction and figuration with a palette that alternates greyish British urbanity with bright Caribbean colors. The most recent works also document Jamaican landscapes - swimming pools, nature, isolated architecture - and represent the extension of the investigation into belonging as a physical and mental place. In parallel to the exhibition, Tate will offer opportunities for further study, with meetings with the artist and the storyteller Clarrie Wallis, former curator of the Tate and now director of Turner Contemporary. The retrospective offers an intimate and universal narrative: Caribbean roots meet British modernity, generating a visual dialogue in which family culture, colonial memory and reflections on identity, continuity and detachment intertwine.