.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Held in the same private collection for twenty-five years and never before seen in public, Untitled (1998) is a luminous early masterpiece by Hurvin Anderson. A pair of figures walk towards us, emerging from a scape of golden and sky-blue brushstrokes almost two metres high. Their texture and translucency are heightened by the resistant panel support. The rear figure is a brilliant red silhouette, with a sweep of cerulean across his face. He holds a large parasol—shaded with gleaming greens, bronzes and dilute blooms of scarlet—which shelters him and his companion. The parasol’s ragged edge casts its shadow on the figure in front, whose face is hidden in darkness. Haloed in glowing, dripping red line, delicate washes of ochre define his body. At once vivid and evanescent, the dreamlike scene is exemplary of Anderson’s work, which dramatises slippages of memory, place and time through the fluid, layered medium of paint. It was painted the year of Anderson’s graduation from the Royal College of Art, London, and sees his practice arrive fully formed.
Working through processes of collage, photocopying, drawing and painting, Anderson creates enigmatic, elusive pictures that view the world as if from a distance. Their layers of interference mirror the act of remembering, and our construction of ideas through images. Born to Jamaican parents in Birmingham in 1965, Anderson grew up dreaming of a warmer and more colourful Caribbean. He developed a way of seeing, he has said, from ‘slightly outside of things’ (H. Anderson, quoted J. Watkins, ‘Foreword’, in Hurvin Anderson: reporting back, exh. cat. Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 2013, p. 7). A formative encounter with Richard Diebenkorn’s sunlit Ocean Park paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1991, would go on to inform the abstracted radiance of his own work. In 2002 Anderson visited Trinidad, following in the footsteps of Peter Doig, who had taught him at the Royal College of Art. The photographs he took there led to a famous body of work inspired by his experience as a stranger on the island—British one moment, Jamaican the next. Themes of memory and displacement, however, guided Anderson from the beginning. His early paintings focused on figures, often exploring the formation of personal identity through shared spaces and stories.
In Bev (1995) Anderson painted a double portrait of his sister, who appears simultaneously as a woman and as a young girl. Different works from his Ball Watching series (1997-2003), derived from a photograph he took of his friends in Handsworth Park in Birmingham, variously reproduce the English setting or transport it—through the substitution of palm trees—to a more tropical locale. Hollywood Boulevard (1997) shows a young Anderson standing beside his father, imitating his upright posture, with a poster for the 1937 all-Black Western musical Harlem on the Prairie visible behind them. The sister paintings Beaver Lake and Mount Royal (Lac des Castors) (both 1998) are based on a 1970s snapshot of Anderson’s niece and aunt standing on a frozen lake in Montreal. Like the present work, these wistful paintings are at once documentary and ambiguous, offering fleeting encounters amid a flux of transoceanic movement, remembrance and passing time. Their figures are often faceless, as if on the verge of melting away.
Two delicate collaged and painted works from 1994—Green Umbrella and Blue and Gold Umbrellas, both held in Norway’s Christen Sveaas Art Foundation—seem to anticipate the parasol of the present work. Here it has become ragged, or possibly fringed with leaves. It is an ambiguous motif, calling up associations of sunlight and tropic heat—as the painting’s blazing colours imply—but also of colonialism. Art history’s most famous parasol is perhaps that in Claude Monet’s Woman With A Parasol – Madame Monet And Her Son (1875), which depicts the artist’s wife and child on a bright, windy summer’s day. The great Impressionist used animated, visible brushstrokes to capture the immediacy of the moment, the transient light, and the inherent abstraction of human experience. Anderson brings these same techniques to bear on the act of memory: its workings and reworkings, its shifts and revisions, its uncertain, open-ended negotiation of who we are.
Working through processes of collage, photocopying, drawing and painting, Anderson creates enigmatic, elusive pictures that view the world as if from a distance. Their layers of interference mirror the act of remembering, and our construction of ideas through images. Born to Jamaican parents in Birmingham in 1965, Anderson grew up dreaming of a warmer and more colourful Caribbean. He developed a way of seeing, he has said, from ‘slightly outside of things’ (H. Anderson, quoted J. Watkins, ‘Foreword’, in Hurvin Anderson: reporting back, exh. cat. Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 2013, p. 7). A formative encounter with Richard Diebenkorn’s sunlit Ocean Park paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1991, would go on to inform the abstracted radiance of his own work. In 2002 Anderson visited Trinidad, following in the footsteps of Peter Doig, who had taught him at the Royal College of Art. The photographs he took there led to a famous body of work inspired by his experience as a stranger on the island—British one moment, Jamaican the next. Themes of memory and displacement, however, guided Anderson from the beginning. His early paintings focused on figures, often exploring the formation of personal identity through shared spaces and stories.
In Bev (1995) Anderson painted a double portrait of his sister, who appears simultaneously as a woman and as a young girl. Different works from his Ball Watching series (1997-2003), derived from a photograph he took of his friends in Handsworth Park in Birmingham, variously reproduce the English setting or transport it—through the substitution of palm trees—to a more tropical locale. Hollywood Boulevard (1997) shows a young Anderson standing beside his father, imitating his upright posture, with a poster for the 1937 all-Black Western musical Harlem on the Prairie visible behind them. The sister paintings Beaver Lake and Mount Royal (Lac des Castors) (both 1998) are based on a 1970s snapshot of Anderson’s niece and aunt standing on a frozen lake in Montreal. Like the present work, these wistful paintings are at once documentary and ambiguous, offering fleeting encounters amid a flux of transoceanic movement, remembrance and passing time. Their figures are often faceless, as if on the verge of melting away.
Two delicate collaged and painted works from 1994—Green Umbrella and Blue and Gold Umbrellas, both held in Norway’s Christen Sveaas Art Foundation—seem to anticipate the parasol of the present work. Here it has become ragged, or possibly fringed with leaves. It is an ambiguous motif, calling up associations of sunlight and tropic heat—as the painting’s blazing colours imply—but also of colonialism. Art history’s most famous parasol is perhaps that in Claude Monet’s Woman With A Parasol – Madame Monet And Her Son (1875), which depicts the artist’s wife and child on a bright, windy summer’s day. The great Impressionist used animated, visible brushstrokes to capture the immediacy of the moment, the transient light, and the inherent abstraction of human experience. Anderson brings these same techniques to bear on the act of memory: its workings and reworkings, its shifts and revisions, its uncertain, open-ended negotiation of who we are.