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Descriptif du lot
Shimmering from the depths of the artist’s memory, Island (1st August) is an exquisite painting on paper relating to Hurvin Anderson’s celebrated Lower Lake series. Executed in 2004, it prefigures three large-scale canvases made between 2005 and 2006, each a depiction of the island in the middle of the lake in Birmingham’s Handsworth Park. Anderson, born in the city to parents who had emigrated from Jamaica, has described it as ‘the first landscape he felt connected to’ (J. Higgie, ‘Another word for feeling,’ in Hurvin Anderson: Reporting Back, exh. cat. Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 2013, p. 14). Recurring throughout his practice like a fragment from a daydream, the scene is drenched in nostalgia and longing, conjuring the slippages of time, place and remembrance. A major example from the Lower Lake series is currently on display at Tate Britain, London as part of Anderson’s first major retrospective.
Anderson first depicted the island in his Ball Watching series, begun in 1997. By the time of the Lower Lake works, however, his internal landscape had shifted. Two years before the present work, he had completed a two-month artist’s residency on Trinidad, where he imbibed the Caribbean heat he had never known as a child. His depictions of the lake combine a wistful sense of familiarity with a newfound yearning for exotic climes. Here, acrylic saturates the paper in luminous hues, dripping down the picture plane as if melting beneath the glare of a tropical sky. The outcrop of vegetation teeters on the brink of abstraction, its form dissolving beneath a flurry of strokes that sparkle like sunlight upon a reflected mirage. Anderson’s use of liquid colour approximates the slippery consistency of memory itself, with shapes and hues surfacing and dissipating across the picture plane.
Throughout his practice, Anderson has used paint to dramatise the feeling of existing between cultures. In his Country Club paintings, he sought to capture the social and racial tensions that pervade Jamaica’s sites of leisure, using abstract devices to conjure his own outsider perspective. Handsworth, too, had seen its share of civil unrest during Anderson’s childhood, memorialised in Black Audio Collective’s 1986 film Handsworth Songs. These complex networks of stories are amplified by Anderson’s technique, which moves seamlessly between photographs, personal memories and art historical recollections. The present work simmers with echoes of Claude Monet’s poplar trees, Paul Cezanne’s hazy mountains, Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series: a formative source of inspiration. There are notes, too, of Romanticism, calling to mind Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead cycle and J. M. W. Turner’s seascapes. Suspended between reality and fantasy, is a portrait of a hybrid world, and the search to find one’s own place within it.
Anderson first depicted the island in his Ball Watching series, begun in 1997. By the time of the Lower Lake works, however, his internal landscape had shifted. Two years before the present work, he had completed a two-month artist’s residency on Trinidad, where he imbibed the Caribbean heat he had never known as a child. His depictions of the lake combine a wistful sense of familiarity with a newfound yearning for exotic climes. Here, acrylic saturates the paper in luminous hues, dripping down the picture plane as if melting beneath the glare of a tropical sky. The outcrop of vegetation teeters on the brink of abstraction, its form dissolving beneath a flurry of strokes that sparkle like sunlight upon a reflected mirage. Anderson’s use of liquid colour approximates the slippery consistency of memory itself, with shapes and hues surfacing and dissipating across the picture plane.
Throughout his practice, Anderson has used paint to dramatise the feeling of existing between cultures. In his Country Club paintings, he sought to capture the social and racial tensions that pervade Jamaica’s sites of leisure, using abstract devices to conjure his own outsider perspective. Handsworth, too, had seen its share of civil unrest during Anderson’s childhood, memorialised in Black Audio Collective’s 1986 film Handsworth Songs. These complex networks of stories are amplified by Anderson’s technique, which moves seamlessly between photographs, personal memories and art historical recollections. The present work simmers with echoes of Claude Monet’s poplar trees, Paul Cezanne’s hazy mountains, Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series: a formative source of inspiration. There are notes, too, of Romanticism, calling to mind Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead cycle and J. M. W. Turner’s seascapes. Suspended between reality and fantasy, is a portrait of a hybrid world, and the search to find one’s own place within it.