Hurvin Anderson
Ascension, 2017
acrylic, oil on canvas
280 x 215 cm.
110 1/4 x 84 5/8 in.
110 1/4 x 84 5/8 in.
Turner Prize 2017 – Hurvin Anderson By Sacha Craddock The place discovered through the process of painting may also be a place you want to leave. Hurvin Anderson paints places...
Turner Prize 2017 – Hurvin Anderson
By Sacha Craddock
The place discovered through the process of painting may also be a place you want to leave. Hurvin Anderson paints places that he wants to see, find and remember, but also ones that he hopes will surprise him. Working with a repertoire of realigned, rearranged and reprinted photographs and drawings, Anderson paints as if always at the crossroads of expectation and meaning. His talk of “push and pull’ is not simply about appearance or what comes to the front of the image, or what denotes deeper space. Push and pull, for Anderson, is the struggle between figure and pattern, finished and unfinished, drawing and painting, paper and canvas, empty and full, home and away. The relationship between paint and print, the power of a washed-out photograph, relates to a sort of unconscious association, where drawings from various photographic sources take the artist further into a different visual logic. The resulting painting is miles away from the image in which it may have originated, if only very loosely. Layers of meaning are peeled back and then replaced across the surface.
The recent drawings, calm and strong when alone, are a telling revelation of a working rationale. Drawing on inkjet print, layering with transparent paper, this fluid process is a series of additions and subtractions, where building up is as important as taking away. Anderson undermines sections of visual thought to disrupt, break, destroy the rationale, as if to metaphorically kick away the props of an ancient mine. The structure gives suddenly, and reference is redefined, repositioned and re-posed until the effect is of something bleached and washed out. The layers, drawn up, through tracing at times, are always about a conflicted desire within Anderson to picture a place but never hold it still with the anchor of description. Much more about a merging of two different and yet real territories, you become aware of colour in its strength and perversity. Making a combination of time and memory, this method starts to weave a warp of understanding that brings together memory and novelty, risk and knowledge, simultaneously.
Anderson talks of seeing boys climbing trees and picking mangoes from a hotel in Montego Bay, Jamaica. It reminded him of growing up in Birmingham, when his brother would go away and then return, having been scrumping for apples. In his recent series of paintings, two places become another almost normal place, part of the same thing. Painting has the ability to draw time and imagination together, to concertina familiar experience and unearth association. The element of time travel here, as in any good painting, carries a shift between the artist's initial observation and the observer’s expectation. Anderson asks, ‘how do you find your position, at the beginning, in order to perceive that place?'. The artist's process betrays not so much his attitude towards making a fixed image and the power it may have for others, as his relationship to it.
The generation of the fixed image is as much a negotiation with himself. The familiar image, an outline of a pear tree around the corner from his studio in South London, for instance, fades in a desire to start again, with the figure brought in and then left out. It seems that by positioning himself each time to create a combination of place and space, he is able to make a hybrid of somewhere known and yet undiscovered. Anderson has always rebuffed an easy exoticisation understanding of the subject. He says he is trying not to be too personal, but has got used to people coming to his work with certain expectations. He tries to control what we see through his eyes and is certainly not trying to speak for us all.
When Anderson makes a painting, he picks up on the drawings, and vice versa, working at both ends. The most recent set of drawings feeds directly into the most recent painting, the method for painting not dissimilar. Familiar in the hope that anything can happen, Anderson talks of elements, figures especially, that somehow do or do not appear, despite his intentions. The figure, or middleman, does not arrive. The role of the observer is key, as we automatically throw ourselves into a pictorial space and attempt to negotiate it. In the Barber Shop: the Peter Series, the last set of paintings that lead up to Is it OK to be black, 2016, we are thrown against the mirror. The original idea was to have a figure there but again we are alone, apart from photographs of Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Marcus Garvey, who look back at us.
Anderson prefers not to wholly depend on direct translation by eye alone from surface to surface as he works. He often makes up a grid in the classical method, in order to map out space and transfer drawing. The equivalent of an artist's impression for architects results in an environment stranger than anything known or seen. The grille in Anderson’s earlier paintings provides a challenging metaphor for vision, light and the potentially desirable space beyond. This continuing allusion to the surface plays on the split between distance and familiarity, and its ability to curtail any real loss of self. The desired place is beyond grasp, forever denied its role as conveyor of fiction.
By Sacha Craddock
The place discovered through the process of painting may also be a place you want to leave. Hurvin Anderson paints places that he wants to see, find and remember, but also ones that he hopes will surprise him. Working with a repertoire of realigned, rearranged and reprinted photographs and drawings, Anderson paints as if always at the crossroads of expectation and meaning. His talk of “push and pull’ is not simply about appearance or what comes to the front of the image, or what denotes deeper space. Push and pull, for Anderson, is the struggle between figure and pattern, finished and unfinished, drawing and painting, paper and canvas, empty and full, home and away. The relationship between paint and print, the power of a washed-out photograph, relates to a sort of unconscious association, where drawings from various photographic sources take the artist further into a different visual logic. The resulting painting is miles away from the image in which it may have originated, if only very loosely. Layers of meaning are peeled back and then replaced across the surface.
The recent drawings, calm and strong when alone, are a telling revelation of a working rationale. Drawing on inkjet print, layering with transparent paper, this fluid process is a series of additions and subtractions, where building up is as important as taking away. Anderson undermines sections of visual thought to disrupt, break, destroy the rationale, as if to metaphorically kick away the props of an ancient mine. The structure gives suddenly, and reference is redefined, repositioned and re-posed until the effect is of something bleached and washed out. The layers, drawn up, through tracing at times, are always about a conflicted desire within Anderson to picture a place but never hold it still with the anchor of description. Much more about a merging of two different and yet real territories, you become aware of colour in its strength and perversity. Making a combination of time and memory, this method starts to weave a warp of understanding that brings together memory and novelty, risk and knowledge, simultaneously.
Anderson talks of seeing boys climbing trees and picking mangoes from a hotel in Montego Bay, Jamaica. It reminded him of growing up in Birmingham, when his brother would go away and then return, having been scrumping for apples. In his recent series of paintings, two places become another almost normal place, part of the same thing. Painting has the ability to draw time and imagination together, to concertina familiar experience and unearth association. The element of time travel here, as in any good painting, carries a shift between the artist's initial observation and the observer’s expectation. Anderson asks, ‘how do you find your position, at the beginning, in order to perceive that place?'. The artist's process betrays not so much his attitude towards making a fixed image and the power it may have for others, as his relationship to it.
The generation of the fixed image is as much a negotiation with himself. The familiar image, an outline of a pear tree around the corner from his studio in South London, for instance, fades in a desire to start again, with the figure brought in and then left out. It seems that by positioning himself each time to create a combination of place and space, he is able to make a hybrid of somewhere known and yet undiscovered. Anderson has always rebuffed an easy exoticisation understanding of the subject. He says he is trying not to be too personal, but has got used to people coming to his work with certain expectations. He tries to control what we see through his eyes and is certainly not trying to speak for us all.
When Anderson makes a painting, he picks up on the drawings, and vice versa, working at both ends. The most recent set of drawings feeds directly into the most recent painting, the method for painting not dissimilar. Familiar in the hope that anything can happen, Anderson talks of elements, figures especially, that somehow do or do not appear, despite his intentions. The figure, or middleman, does not arrive. The role of the observer is key, as we automatically throw ourselves into a pictorial space and attempt to negotiate it. In the Barber Shop: the Peter Series, the last set of paintings that lead up to Is it OK to be black, 2016, we are thrown against the mirror. The original idea was to have a figure there but again we are alone, apart from photographs of Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Marcus Garvey, who look back at us.
Anderson prefers not to wholly depend on direct translation by eye alone from surface to surface as he works. He often makes up a grid in the classical method, in order to map out space and transfer drawing. The equivalent of an artist's impression for architects results in an environment stranger than anything known or seen. The grille in Anderson’s earlier paintings provides a challenging metaphor for vision, light and the potentially desirable space beyond. This continuing allusion to the surface plays on the split between distance and familiarity, and its ability to curtail any real loss of self. The desired place is beyond grasp, forever denied its role as conveyor of fiction.