Hurvin Anderson review – this haunted, hazy, beautiful show is like stumbling through someone’s memories

Tate Britain, London Anderson creates figurative paintings with a dreamlike intangibility, exploring his black British and Jamaican heritage with a startlingly fragile and unresolved intensity Us and them, then and now, concrete and jungle, acceptance and rejection … Birmingham and Jamaica. Hurvin Anderson’s world is defined by clashing contrasts, by conflicts that can’t ever be resolved. The British artist’s washed out, hazy, heat-drenched take on figurative painting is him trying to figure it all out, to make sense of a senseless world. That he doesn’t manage to – that you leave this big, affecting and often very beautiful retrospective at Tate Britain with more questions than answers – doesn’t mean he’s failed. The opposite, actually. Back in 1990s Birmingham, where he grew up, Anderson started painting from photos – family snapshots, images found in dusty boxes. A woman in a patterned dress seems to melt into the wallpaper behind her. Figures walking down plane steps are slowly turning into ghosts. His adult sister sits next to herself as a child. A photograph may promise some kind of nostalgic truth, but then Anderson paints it and it all collapses. Geograp

Mar 24, 2026 → Apr 8, 2026