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Lot Essay
‘I was using Handsworth Park, near where I grew up in Birmingham, as a way to engage with the British landscape. It was a place I knew, a place I understood’ (Hurvin Anderson)
Executed in 2005, and held in the same private collection since the following year, Hurvin Anderson’s expansive, jewel-toned Lower Lake celebrates the slipperiness of paint and memory. Extending over two and a half metres in width, it is one of just three paintings on this scale depicting the spiky outcrop of vegetation on an island at the centre of Handsworth Park, in the artist’s home city of Birmingham. Passages of graphic delicacy—the umber overleaf of branches which extend across the upper portion of the picture plane—are countered by others of quietly luminous intensity. Thinned washes of oil paint cascade across the canvas as pale, rose-tinted pinks vie with aqueous brushes of turquoise and viridian. Depicting a pivotal motif within the artist’s oeuvre, the work was exhibited in Anderson’s celebrated homecoming survey at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in 2013, and has been requested for his major upcoming exhibition at Tate Britain in 2026.
For Anderson, born in Birmingham to parents recently emigrated from Jamaica, the abundant island within the Handsworth Park lake helped to articulate conflicting feelings of home and belonging. Anderson’s oeuvre is marked by meditations on a theme. He returns in paint to the local barber shop in Birmingham where, with his father as a young child, he first felt a sense of Caribbean community; to the country club tennis courts he glimpsed on his first trip to the Caribbean in 2002, as part of an artist’s residency in Trinidad; and to Handsworth Park—its lake, its benches, the young men who gather there to play football. Handsworth is a district of the city renowned for civil unrest in the early 1980s, as memorialised in Black Audio Collective’s seminal film Handsworth Songs (1986). In Lower Lake this context is implied through absence. Silent, and void of human presence, it captures the history and memory which linger in places and in moments of ‘after’ or ‘before’.
The lake has a unique significance for Anderson: he has described it as ‘the first landscape he felt connected to, a place that exists yet is just out of reach’ (J. Higgie, ‘Another word for feeling,’ in Hurvin Anderson: Reporting Back, exh. cat. Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 2013, p. 14). Returning to this known place, the artist’s mind could wander to others, unknown or faintly known but still steeped in a sense of home. His paintings hover between familiarity and estrangement, permeated by a sense that beyond the physical place depicted there is another, mental zone which forms the true heart of the painting.
Paint, like memory, is porous and indeterminate. Anderson approaches the canvas through a careful, collage-like process of layering and reworking. Paint seeps into its warp and weft and bleeds in overlapping, horizontal drips, conjuring form from colour and gesture. Anderson’s radiant canvases recall Richard Diebenkorn's sunlit Ocean Park paintings, which he first encountered at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1991, as well as the oneiric landscapes of Peter Doig, who had taught Anderson at the Royal College of Art and whose paintings likewise traverse British and Caribbean landscapes. He lingers on the edge of abstraction, recalling the soak-stained canvases of Helen Frankenthaler or the drips of Jackson Pollock, yet his early visual education was distinctly British, shaped by artists like Michael Andrews, and the Romantic landscapes of J.W.M. Turner and John Constable.
In a nostalgic weaving together of different realms, Lower Lake’s shimmering, technicolour palette evokes the bright light of the Caribbean. The uncanny effect suggests a recollected scene, its hazy contours dredged from the recesses of memory. Anderson’s oeuvre is informed by an outsider’s perspective, peering through the vibrant, decorative grilles and chicken wire fences which he spied around Caribbean homes and country clubs and replicated in several important series of paintings across the early 2000s. Lower Lake extends this notion of distance and detachment. The island in the middle of the lake is at once suburban, utopian, and unreachable. Capturing the uncanny slippages, yearnings and dislocations experienced by many first and second-generation migrants, the lake looms large within Anderson’s mental landscape. With talismanic intensity, Lower Lake invites the viewer into a prismatic, enveloping meditation on place and belonging.
Executed in 2005, and held in the same private collection since the following year, Hurvin Anderson’s expansive, jewel-toned Lower Lake celebrates the slipperiness of paint and memory. Extending over two and a half metres in width, it is one of just three paintings on this scale depicting the spiky outcrop of vegetation on an island at the centre of Handsworth Park, in the artist’s home city of Birmingham. Passages of graphic delicacy—the umber overleaf of branches which extend across the upper portion of the picture plane—are countered by others of quietly luminous intensity. Thinned washes of oil paint cascade across the canvas as pale, rose-tinted pinks vie with aqueous brushes of turquoise and viridian. Depicting a pivotal motif within the artist’s oeuvre, the work was exhibited in Anderson’s celebrated homecoming survey at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in 2013, and has been requested for his major upcoming exhibition at Tate Britain in 2026.
For Anderson, born in Birmingham to parents recently emigrated from Jamaica, the abundant island within the Handsworth Park lake helped to articulate conflicting feelings of home and belonging. Anderson’s oeuvre is marked by meditations on a theme. He returns in paint to the local barber shop in Birmingham where, with his father as a young child, he first felt a sense of Caribbean community; to the country club tennis courts he glimpsed on his first trip to the Caribbean in 2002, as part of an artist’s residency in Trinidad; and to Handsworth Park—its lake, its benches, the young men who gather there to play football. Handsworth is a district of the city renowned for civil unrest in the early 1980s, as memorialised in Black Audio Collective’s seminal film Handsworth Songs (1986). In Lower Lake this context is implied through absence. Silent, and void of human presence, it captures the history and memory which linger in places and in moments of ‘after’ or ‘before’.
The lake has a unique significance for Anderson: he has described it as ‘the first landscape he felt connected to, a place that exists yet is just out of reach’ (J. Higgie, ‘Another word for feeling,’ in Hurvin Anderson: Reporting Back, exh. cat. Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 2013, p. 14). Returning to this known place, the artist’s mind could wander to others, unknown or faintly known but still steeped in a sense of home. His paintings hover between familiarity and estrangement, permeated by a sense that beyond the physical place depicted there is another, mental zone which forms the true heart of the painting.
Paint, like memory, is porous and indeterminate. Anderson approaches the canvas through a careful, collage-like process of layering and reworking. Paint seeps into its warp and weft and bleeds in overlapping, horizontal drips, conjuring form from colour and gesture. Anderson’s radiant canvases recall Richard Diebenkorn's sunlit Ocean Park paintings, which he first encountered at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1991, as well as the oneiric landscapes of Peter Doig, who had taught Anderson at the Royal College of Art and whose paintings likewise traverse British and Caribbean landscapes. He lingers on the edge of abstraction, recalling the soak-stained canvases of Helen Frankenthaler or the drips of Jackson Pollock, yet his early visual education was distinctly British, shaped by artists like Michael Andrews, and the Romantic landscapes of J.W.M. Turner and John Constable.
In a nostalgic weaving together of different realms, Lower Lake’s shimmering, technicolour palette evokes the bright light of the Caribbean. The uncanny effect suggests a recollected scene, its hazy contours dredged from the recesses of memory. Anderson’s oeuvre is informed by an outsider’s perspective, peering through the vibrant, decorative grilles and chicken wire fences which he spied around Caribbean homes and country clubs and replicated in several important series of paintings across the early 2000s. Lower Lake extends this notion of distance and detachment. The island in the middle of the lake is at once suburban, utopian, and unreachable. Capturing the uncanny slippages, yearnings and dislocations experienced by many first and second-generation migrants, the lake looms large within Anderson’s mental landscape. With talismanic intensity, Lower Lake invites the viewer into a prismatic, enveloping meditation on place and belonging.