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Lot Essay
‘It was a place I knew, a place I understood’ (Hurvin Anderson)
A glimmering panorama spanning over two and a half metres in width, Untitled (Lower Lake) is an important work by Hurvin Anderson. Painted in 2005, it belongs to a pivotal series of three large-scale paintings depicting the island in the middle of Handsworth Park in Birmingham, where the artist grew up. Born to Jamaican parents who had emigrated to the UK, Anderson addresses complex themes of memory and belonging, using paint to visualise the sensation of slipping between worlds. In the present work, the artist infuses the familiar spaces of his youth with a sense of exotic reverie and wonder. Paint drips down the canvas in liquid veils, shimmering in bands of green, mauve and blue. Trees are picked out with golden light, their branches pale and skeletal against glowing swathes of colour. Alive with nostalgia and fantasy in equal measure, the work was formerly owned by the antiques dealer and curator Gordon Watson, and was included in Anderson’s major homecoming solo exhibition at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in 2013.
In conversation with Jennifer Higgie, Anderson described the lake in Handsworth Park 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, pp. 13-14). The motif, indeed, would feature in various guises throughout the artist’s oeuvre. In his Ball Watching series, begun in 1997, he looked back to a time when he a group of friends lost a football in the water. The Lower Lake works, however, took on a new degree of wistfulness. In 2005 Anderson had just returned to London from an artist’s residency on Trinidad, and had been deeply inspired by his first encounter with the Caribbean’s tropical climes. In the present work, he combines a sense of longing for the past with a yearning for a faraway home he had never known. Paint melts down the canvas as if baked by the sun; his colours are drenched in the light of a foreign land. Reality slips in and out of focus in the work’s fluid surface, quivering like a watery reflection.
Anderson studied at the Royal College of Art with Peter Doig, whose own practice is rooted in themes of dislocation. He combines photographs, memories and painterly textures in a layered, collage-like process, approximating the porous, indeterminate nature of memory itself. At the same time, he draws upon a deep understanding of art history. Higgie writes that the present work ‘recalls the various version of the Isle of the Dead made by the great Romantic painter Arnold Böcklin, between 1880 and 1886; Anderson’s version is, perhaps, less literally melancholic, but still, its washes of pale lilac stir up a wistfulness and a longing, the object of which is not made explicit’ (J. Higgie, ibid.). References to the works of Claude Monet and Georges Seurat linger in the work’s exquisite dappled light. While British landscape artists such as J. M. W. Turner and John Constable had shaped Anderson’s early visual education, the painting also witnesses his dialogue with American abstraction, evoking Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings—first encountered at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1991—as well as the colour-drenched stains of Helen Frankenthaler.
Anderson has addressed the twin sides of his heritage throughout his oeuvre. He repeatedly depicted the Birmingham barbershop he visited with his father as a child: a place where he first became aware of the city’s Caribbean community. In his Country Club series, meanwhile, he dramatized subtle hints of racial and social friction in Jamaica’s sites of leisure. The Lower Lake paintings, too, confront themes of cultural collision. The district of Handsworth was a site of civil unrest during Anderson’s youth, memorialised in Black Audio Collective’s seminal film Handsworth Songs (1986). However, as Jonathan Watkins writes, ‘instead of riots and violence we see quiet, relatively empty locations. These are the streets, parks and other public (in-between) places where the artist as a young man walked and met with friends, played football or simply hung around. They haunt him, like the sun, sea and palm trees of the Caribbean’ (J. Watkins, ‘Foreword’, in Hurvin Anderson: reporting back, ibid., p. 9). In the present work’s sunlit mirage—at once utopian and unreachable—Anderson positions himself as both insider and outsider to his own hybrid world.
A glimmering panorama spanning over two and a half metres in width, Untitled (Lower Lake) is an important work by Hurvin Anderson. Painted in 2005, it belongs to a pivotal series of three large-scale paintings depicting the island in the middle of Handsworth Park in Birmingham, where the artist grew up. Born to Jamaican parents who had emigrated to the UK, Anderson addresses complex themes of memory and belonging, using paint to visualise the sensation of slipping between worlds. In the present work, the artist infuses the familiar spaces of his youth with a sense of exotic reverie and wonder. Paint drips down the canvas in liquid veils, shimmering in bands of green, mauve and blue. Trees are picked out with golden light, their branches pale and skeletal against glowing swathes of colour. Alive with nostalgia and fantasy in equal measure, the work was formerly owned by the antiques dealer and curator Gordon Watson, and was included in Anderson’s major homecoming solo exhibition at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in 2013.
In conversation with Jennifer Higgie, Anderson described the lake in Handsworth Park 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, pp. 13-14). The motif, indeed, would feature in various guises throughout the artist’s oeuvre. In his Ball Watching series, begun in 1997, he looked back to a time when he a group of friends lost a football in the water. The Lower Lake works, however, took on a new degree of wistfulness. In 2005 Anderson had just returned to London from an artist’s residency on Trinidad, and had been deeply inspired by his first encounter with the Caribbean’s tropical climes. In the present work, he combines a sense of longing for the past with a yearning for a faraway home he had never known. Paint melts down the canvas as if baked by the sun; his colours are drenched in the light of a foreign land. Reality slips in and out of focus in the work’s fluid surface, quivering like a watery reflection.
Anderson studied at the Royal College of Art with Peter Doig, whose own practice is rooted in themes of dislocation. He combines photographs, memories and painterly textures in a layered, collage-like process, approximating the porous, indeterminate nature of memory itself. At the same time, he draws upon a deep understanding of art history. Higgie writes that the present work ‘recalls the various version of the Isle of the Dead made by the great Romantic painter Arnold Böcklin, between 1880 and 1886; Anderson’s version is, perhaps, less literally melancholic, but still, its washes of pale lilac stir up a wistfulness and a longing, the object of which is not made explicit’ (J. Higgie, ibid.). References to the works of Claude Monet and Georges Seurat linger in the work’s exquisite dappled light. While British landscape artists such as J. M. W. Turner and John Constable had shaped Anderson’s early visual education, the painting also witnesses his dialogue with American abstraction, evoking Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings—first encountered at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1991—as well as the colour-drenched stains of Helen Frankenthaler.
Anderson has addressed the twin sides of his heritage throughout his oeuvre. He repeatedly depicted the Birmingham barbershop he visited with his father as a child: a place where he first became aware of the city’s Caribbean community. In his Country Club series, meanwhile, he dramatized subtle hints of racial and social friction in Jamaica’s sites of leisure. The Lower Lake paintings, too, confront themes of cultural collision. The district of Handsworth was a site of civil unrest during Anderson’s youth, memorialised in Black Audio Collective’s seminal film Handsworth Songs (1986). However, as Jonathan Watkins writes, ‘instead of riots and violence we see quiet, relatively empty locations. These are the streets, parks and other public (in-between) places where the artist as a young man walked and met with friends, played football or simply hung around. They haunt him, like the sun, sea and palm trees of the Caribbean’ (J. Watkins, ‘Foreword’, in Hurvin Anderson: reporting back, ibid., p. 9). In the present work’s sunlit mirage—at once utopian and unreachable—Anderson positions himself as both insider and outsider to his own hybrid world.