Hurvin Anderson

This is the first comprehensive overview of the career to date of British-born Jamaican artist Hurvin Anderson (b. 1965). Anderson is known for painting lush and loosely rendered observations of scenes and spaces loaded with personal meaning.

Turner Prize-nominated artist Hurvin Anderson is best known for his brightly painted, densely detailed landscapes and interior scenes—particularly those relating to his upbringing in the Afro-Caribbean community in the Midlands of England, as well as more recent trips to the Caribbean. Anderson’s luscious paintings have hybridity at their heart. A tug-of-war plays out between abstraction and figuration, nature versus the manmade, beauty and menace, and his British and Jamaican heritage.

Born in the United Kingdom as a member of the Jamaican diaspora, Anderson relates to the Caribbean as both insider and outsider, aware of the mythmaking that the idea of lost or future paradise generates. This book, Anderson’s first major monograph, has been carefully curated by the artist himself and includes paintings, sketches, source material and ephemera, and studio shots. The volume also features a foreword by Courtney J. Martin, an in-depth and deeply considered essay by art historian Catherine Lampert, poems by Roger Robinson, and an illustrated chronology.

Courtney J. Martin is Director of the Yale Center for British Art. Catherine Lampert is an independent curator and art historian. She has curated numerous exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery, the Royal Academy of the Arts, and the Whitechapel Gallery, where she was director from 1988 to 2001. Roger Robinson is a British writer, musician, and performer who lives between England and Trinidad. His book A Portable Paradise (Peepal Tree Press) won the prestigious 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize, announced in London in January 2020. He is the second writer of Caribbean heritage to win the prize, the highest-value award in UK poetry, after Derek Walcott won in 2010.