Artist Hurvin Anderson shares the inspiration and ideas behind his paintings, and how he uses photography within his work.
Born in the UK and raised in the Caribbean before settling in the United Kingdom, Hurvin Anderson creates work embedded with the imagery, colors, and social history of his origins, as well as his early experiences of dislocation. His paintings and drawings are representational, but he typically disrupts their legibility with gestural marks or abstract patterns. “Once an abstract pattern is set against a background, you feel as though you’re breaking up the image underneath,” he has said. “You’re not quite sure what to focus on.” Hurvin works from photographs, as is evident in his 2011 “Mrs. S. Keita” series, whose visual interruptions to the technically produced image are, in part, references to the instability of memory or history. Using lush, sparely deployed textural and patterned imagery, he sets up contradictions and juxtapositions that evoke the indeterminacy of living between cultures.