Edits

Hurvin Anderson’s Edits revisits earlier compositions—Jungle Garden (2020; De Ying Foundation) and Ashanti Blood (2021; private collection)—from his Jamaican hotel series. Based on photographs that the artist took during walks in Oracabessa, Jamaica in 2017, the series takes as its starting point pictures of an abandoned, unfinished hotel complex overtaken by vegetation. In these unsettling paintings of the Caribbean, greens and greys evoke lush foliage erupting through concrete ruins, while yellow and white tendrils give way to vivid pinks and reds of tropical flora. The landscape in Edits approaches abstraction, as Anderson transforms the site into a hybrid space of memory, aspiration, migration, and belonging.

Born in Birmingham, England to Jamaican parents of the Windrush generation, people from the Caribbean who migrated to Britain, particularly between 1948 and 1971, Anderson has long drawn on both personal experience and the grand Western traditions of landscape painting, especially the metaphorical potential of nature reclaiming ruins. The title Edits acknowledges Anderson’s process of revision, not only in returning to his own work, but in recognizing his work’s dialogue with histories of painting and with diasporic histories and their entanglement with colonialism. It also points to a resistance to a singular historical perspective in favor of understanding the past, place, and representation as layered, contingent, and continually subject to revision.

This outlook is also borne out in Anderson’s approach to his materials, as seen here in his construction of the composition as a composite of elements built across multiple sheets of paper that are then adhered to board resulting in a surface that bears traces of negotiation between control and chance. Overlapping sheets create irregular, lightly ridged seams. As the paper expanded and contracted, Anderson followed creases and wrinkles with painted lines. Smaller pieces of paper were collaged onto the surface and painted over, most noticeably in the darker passages, as if to give those shadowy depths more heft and presence. Grid lines, used to enlarge the photographic source, occasionally remain visible, further revealing the painting’s iterative process.