Hurvin Anderson review – this haunted, hazy, beautiful show is like stumbling through someone’s memories

2026-03-24 - 09:20

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. Continue reading...