‘It’s everyone’s history’: the artist Hurvin Anderson on his Tate Britain retrospective

“It’s about painting and it’s not about painting,” Hurvin Anderson tells me, of his stunning mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain, on a sunny spring afternoon in London. You can’t see the sun from where we’re sitting, inside the ground floor galleries that house the historic institution’s temporary exhibitions, but the paintings around us seem to radiate their own, very particular light — thin, clear, lucid, hot but sometimes cool, and emanating not from a single source but as if from the entire canvas. 

This might be technical: the artist paints on linen that has been carefully mounted on a stretcher (by Alan Fitzpatrick, who also constructs Bridget Riley’s painting supports) and painted with a white ground that is then sanded down and reapplied numerous times. The result is a hard, impervious surface that gives the entire work a sense of even light. It might be art historical: Anderson is well-versed in painting history, and across the hall, the Tate’s collection of British art is peppered with paintings by artists who understood the power of a white primer, from the bright, detailed canvases of the late 19^th century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Dante Gabriel Rossetti and co.) to lucent pastel scenes of the early 20^th century Camden Town Group helmed by Walter Sickert. 

It might also be personal, geographical, cultural: “the white ground has a luminosity that is particularly effective for rendering the piercing sunlight of the Caribbean,” writes the art historian Gillian Forrester in the lush catalogue that accompanies the show. Her essay considers what she calls “the Britishness of Hurvin Anderson’s diasporic landscapes,” a phrase that perfectly encapsulates the quiet tension and enigmatic sense of time travel — through place, landscape, history, memory — that undergirds his canvases. The sense that we are here, but also elsewhere; moving through glimpses of past and present that are recognisable, but which have been gathered and assembled to create something new: a space for thinking and asking questions that may remain unanswered. 

Anderson grew up in Birmingham, the youngest of eight siblings and the first to be born in England (in 1965), following his parents’ emigration from Jamaica in 1961. His atmospheric paintings, which depict public spaces in the British isles as much as they do scenes of distant, greener, warmer islands that have nonetheless been inescapably shaped by British history (Jamaica gained its independence from the UK on 6 August 1962, but remains under the broad umbrella of the Commonwealth, and retains King Charles III as its ceremonial head of state), have often been described as a representation of Black British life and how it straddles the Atlantic: “Being in one place but thinking about another,” as he explains it. What this actually looks like on the canvas is just as varied as it should be. 

The exhibition at Tate Britain is the first major survey of Anderson’s work and spans his entire career — from his studies in the mid-90s and early 2000s at Wimbledon School of Art and the Royal College of Art, respectively, to the present day (he works from a purpose-built home studio in Cambridgeshire today and is a married father of five). The earliest painting, Bev (1995), is a portrait of his sister in which she appears simultaneously at two different ages: a small child sits next to a young woman, both Bev, but also somehow a family portrait, the two huddled together in intimate familiarity (the child is mother of the woman, we might adapt Wordsworth’s famous line). The work is in tones of grisaille, and the two figures are featureless, as if an old family photograph has forgotten itself or perhaps been worn out with looking or thumbing, but still retains its memorial aura. The latest canvases are as recent as humanly possible, 2026, four new works created specifically for the show, conceived as pairs that face each other as if across a gulf of time and place: one pairing shows a couple rafting down a river in Jamaica; the other pairing shows children scrumping (picking apples) in England, merged in time and space with the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie arriving to jubilant Jamaican crowds in 1966. An aeroplane soars above, from where to where, who knows, as if closing — fusing, inextricably linking — the two moments and locales. 

When I ask Anderson, who is tall and modest, with a gentle air, what it was like to put together the show (with the inevitable inborn strangeness of a “retrospective” of one’s own work, which is still ongoing), his answer weaves back and forth across the complexity of “chronology,” in art as in life. “There is a chronology, which is the history of the work, but going backwards and forwards in terms of a timeline of history, and also ideas that come backwards and forwards. It’s the way I work, the way the works are made. You think you’ve finished something, but actually you haven’t, there’s more to be done,” he says. Are these statements as much about cultural history as they are about painting, and how the two are intimately linked? “I guess the fundamental question is what is painting, why is painting?” he continues. “The way I understood painting, or British painting, there was a particular standpoint, non-personal, super-objective, but I have learned that there’s more to painting than that, I think we’re understanding that paintings have a different role. It’s not just about the surface, there are more questions to be asked, about the big history, and that’s what I’m tussling with. But it’s also playful, it’s about painting and what you can do with an idea, a balance between the image and how it’s painted.” 

He turns to look at the paintings on the walls around us, a section titled “Is It OK To Be Black?,” which contains two of the barbershop painting series he is well known for (in 2023, the Hepworth Wakefield mounted a show focused on these and they also featured in his Turner Prize show when he was nominated in 2017) alongside six canvases that show landscapes and interiors. But it’s difficult to classify Anderson’s work in genre typologies — each image contains multitudes, frames within frames, sightlines that intervene to flatten or disrupt the legibility of a setting, veering between figuration and abstraction, reminding us that a painting is, after all, a construction, a question about what can be done within four sides of fixed size and shape. Are these terms and categories within art important to him? He smiles and moves on quickly without answering directly, and I realise how many times he has followed the word “painting” with “whatever that means,” as if to remind, always, that the practice is wide open for reinvention. 

“For me, the question about the history of painting is how radical are you? Are you joining in with the destruction of this history, or are you opening up and then questioning, bringing forward a history that has always been there but is not necessarily seen.” Anderson gestures towards the door of the room, pointing back to the opening of the exhibition, where Black Audio Film Collective’s seminal 1986 film, Handsworth Songs, about the riots in Handsworth and London a year earlier, is projected in a separate darkened space, meaning you could watch it as prologue or epilogue to the show, or both. “I realise this may sound alienating to another viewer,” he continues, “but this exhibition is about Black Caribbean history, but I also think that once you start looking at it, you’ll start to realise it’s everyone’s history.”   

Hurvin Anderson is at Tate Britain, London SW1 from Thursday 26 March until 23 August

Emily LaBarge is the Nerve's art critic. A Canadian writer living in London, her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, New York Times, Artforum, mousse, Bookforum, Frieze, The Paris Review and more. Her debut book, Dog Days, was published last year by Peninsula Press.