Hurvin Anderson: artist of the ‘in-between space’

When Hurvin Anderson visited Jamaica in 2006, he took so many photographs that his brother-in-law remarked it was as if he was trying to take the island back home with him. ‘There was a little bit of that,’ he concedes. ‘Trying to get to know the place, trying to bring back a feeling. I wanted to understand the light, the architecture, the signs: how people do things there.’

What is it like to be born out of place? It is a question the Royal Academician has been asking for the better part of 30 years. His paintings, which shift in perspective, moving lucidly between abstraction and landscape, seek to articulate the sense of belonging to more than one culture. He is deeply conscious of his place in — or absence from — history. He has ‘always been intrigued by the idea of a no man’s land, a kind of in-between space and what that might look like, what it might mean’.

Raised in un-exotic Handsworth in Birmingham, an area chiefly known in the media for a series of civil disturbances in the early 1980s, Anderson was the only one of eight siblings to be born in the UK. He grew up listening to stories of the Caribbean. ‘There was a difference between British-born diasporic Jamaicans and Jamaicans,’ he says, ‘and it always intrigued me what that thing was.’ On his first visit to the Caribbean as a teenager, he discovered that, just as in Handsworth, perceptions were different from reality on the ground.

His paintings challenge such casual misinterpretations with a quiet tact. ‘I’m trying to get at where these things overlap or clash,’ he says. The pleasure zone of green-banked rivers, sun-stoned beaches and ragged palm trees that typify the tourist’s vision of the Caribbean is contrasted with subtle indicators of how the travel industry has exploited the islanders: the chain-link fence around a tennis court; the high hedge of a country club; the elaborate grilles on a shop window.

This tension has a long history in Caribbean culture. In Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros, he considers the dispossession caused by tourism in St Lucia and identifies the traitors ‘who, in elected office, saw the land as views for hotels and elevated into waiters the sons of others, while their own learnt something else’.

Anderson approaches this history more obliquely. He lets the landscape carry his unease, with the intemperate weather of the Caribbean becoming a barometer of the social order. In Between the Gulf of Paria and the Atlantic: Maracas (2003) — one of three paintings (together with a drawing and a print) by Anderson offered in Monsoon: The Peter Simon Collection — a solid shelf of vegetation looms over drowsy figures on Maracas beach in Trinidad. The sand is a zinc white, the palm trees scorched grey by the blinding light — like the flash flare of an over-exposed photograph. ‘It’s about playing with this perception of the Caribbean being a place of lush greenery and challenging the idea that nature is always beautiful,’ he says. ‘It is also something that can be aggressive and ominous.’

That disturbance becomes more tangible in the 2005 work Hope Gardens. It depicts the entrance to the botanical gardens in Jamaica’s capital, Kingston. The gardens have a chequered history: they were acquired by the colonial government from a sugar plantation owner in the 19th century and have undergone erratic attempts at regeneration over the years, particularly in the 1960s, when pleasure cruises began to turn Jamaica into a tourist destination. The brave optimism of the word ‘HOPE’ is overwhelmed by the eruption of wild vegetation cascading over the wall like surf breaking on the waves.

That sense of abundance is taken to extremes in Last House (2013), in which dense green foliage, dripping with humidity, seems to break out of the picture space. The painting could be mistaken for another view of Trinidad or Jamaica, but in fact it depicts the Palm House at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, south-west London. The grand glass-and-iron building is famous for its tropical plants, brought back by explorers to be cultivated by botanists. Anderson’s work, which was featured in the Turner Prize exhibition in 2017 and in the artist’s recent retrospective at Tate Britain, alludes to debates about ecological imperialism — the global reshuffling of plants, animals, people and microbes by empire-builders.

By erasing national boundaries and geographical distances, Anderson unsettles our sense of place. In his quest to understand the meaning of belonging to more than one culture, he reveals that only the thinnest of membranes separates us from one another.

Monsoon: The Peter Simon Collection will be offered across Evening and Day sales (14 and 15 October 2026), in addition to an Online Sale (1-20 October). Viewing takes place until 1 October (full exhibition), followed by a highlights exhibition, 8-14 October

Explore Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art London auctions, 14-21 October 2026