April 22, 2021
"I have entered a new place, slightly unsure. Actually, through making paintings you engage with questions you are unsure about. My struggle with Jamaica: I don’t know it and I know it. I have this romantic vision of it and a lot of the painting is fighting that romance."
—Hurvin Anderson
Please join acclaimed painter Hurvin Anderson in conversation with cultural historian Michael Prokopow on the occasion of his exhibition, Hurvin Anderson: Anywhere but Nowhere, at the Arts Club of Chicago.
Hurvin Anderson: Anywhere but Nowhere brings together new landscape paintings and ongoing work from the artist’s celebrated “barbershop” series, which he began in 2005. This combination of interiors in Britain and exteriors in Jamaica, including sketches and preparatory materials from both series, connects Anderson’s way of working and thinking across subject matter. The multiple studies and recurring viewpoints testify to his methodical and continuous examination of formal characteristics and abstraction, even as he addresses compelling social themes. Born in Birmingham, England, to parents of Jamaican descent, Anderson confronts the Carribean island nation with the distance and nostalgia of the diaspora. His barbershop paintings depict the intimacy of gathering marked by such small-scale, émigré businesses while the landscapes take on the conundrum of tourism. Anderson sights the simultaneous development and dereliction caused by the travel industry in the recurring views of perforated limestone remnants overgrown with foliage. The monumental, multi-canvas panorama No one remembers, 2021, made expressly for the Arts Club's gallery, combines the specificity of recognizable mural signage and political motifs with abstract fields to counter any tendency to slip into the comfort of idylls.
Hurvin Anderson (b. 1965, Birmingham, United Kingdom) lives and works in London. He studied at Wimbledon School of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2017, Anderson’s work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Selected solo exhibitions include Foreign Body, Michael Werner Gallery, New York, USA (2016); Backdrop, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada (2016); Dub Versions, New Art Exchange, Nottingham, UK (2016); Backdrop, CAM, St. Louis, USA (2015); Reporting Back, IKON Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2013); Subtitles, Michael Werner Gallery, New York, USA (2011); and ART NOW: Hurvin Anderson, Tate Britain, London, UK (2009).
Dr. Michael J. Prokopow is a cultural historian and curator. His areas of expertise include material culture, aesthetics and design history. He has written widely about material life and domesticity and is currently working on a project on middle-class taste in North America between 1940 and 1975. Between 2004 and 2008, he was curator of the Design Exchange, Canada's only museum of 20th-century industrial design. In 2012, he was co-curator of the Museum for the End of the World's The Monumental Project, Scotia Bank Nuit Blanche in Toronto. In addition, in 2011 he curated an exhibition on the work of architect and theorist George Baird at the Daniels Faculty of Landscape, Architecture and Design and he was co-curator of the Leona Drive Project, a site specific installation in Willowdale, Ontario. Currently he is working on an exhibition on the roles of Scandinavian aesthetics in Canadian design culture between 1920 and the present and a project for the New York Times on prison architecture and the aesthetics of incarceration.
