It’s such a shame that the incels have rather ruined The Matrix’s red pill/blue pill as a metaphor. Tate Britain’s new exhibition, a retrospective of Hurvin Anderson’s work, offers the viewer a deceptively simple yet seismic choice on arrival in the upper galleries.
Go through the main door, and you can bask, untroubled, in his expansive canvases, with glowing colours and architectural lines that have all the genius of early David Hockney (before he got bogged down in fingerpainting on an iPad). Instead of sunny California, there are scenes of municipal England with its busy swimming pools and wintry skies, which eventually give way to the tropical lushness of Jamaica.
You can tick off Anderson’s heavy hitters, such as Audition (1999), the pool scene he painted in the final year of his master’s at London’s Royal College of Art, which sold at auction in 2021 for £7.4 million, breaking the artist’s 2017 record of £2.6 million for Country Club Chicken Wire (2008). And, of course, Is It Ok To Be Black? (2016).
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At which point you might begin to wonder if something more complex is lurking beneath the gorgeously appointed surface of Anderson’s canvases. But not if you have taken the artist’s recommended path by turning right upon entry into an eerie screening room where he has selected Hansworth Song to play on a continuous loop.
Anderson, 61, personally selected John Akomfrah’s hour-long documentary to play alongside his retrospective. Released in 1986 by the Black Audio Film Collective, it explores how people came to England from our former colonies in the Caribbean and South Asia to help rebuild after the Second World War, only to face racism and discrimination.
The name and much of the footage are pulled from the 1985 uprisings in Handsworth, a district of Birmingham. The uprising was sparked by the arrest of a black man, sparking the tinder of racial tension between the police and local black and Asian communities, undergirded by mass youth unemployment for these children of the Windrush and post-partition migrants.
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When Anderson was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2017, the jury claimed his art spoke directly to “our current political moment”. Almost a decade on and four Prime Ministers later, Britain’s political moment is very different, but also the same as ever. Reform UK, founded in 2018, has made anti-immigration its raison d’etre.
Anderson was born in Birmingham, the youngest of eight and the only one of his siblings born in England rather than Jamaica. His art is deeply personal in its reflection of his life in this liminal state. A black man made in England but not of it; a descendant of Jamaica but only ever hearing fairy tales of the island his family called home. A black family from Jamaica that can trace their own journey to a foreign land back to the slave trade. It’s an outsider-insider state he explores with vigour in his work from the 2000s, during a residency in Trinidad.
Of course, you can opt to skip the one-hour documentary on the uncomfortable racial politics of Anderson’s upbringing and enjoy the beautiful aesthetics of his work untroubled by the details of the thoughtful captions. But it adds a bittersweet layer of complexity and nuance to his eye for colour and geometry.
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Look closer at the pleasing geometry in a metal grill or an expanse of chicken wire, rendered with astounding technical prowess, and you can feel the almost-invisible barrier between the viewer and the tropical scene beyond. Be drawn in by the bright splashes of fuchsia flowers amongst the lush foliage reclaiming crumbling colonial-era hotels in pieces such as Ashanti Blood (2021).
But as the caption reveals, there is a double meaning. The West African shrub, with its arterial spray of flowers, alludes to the blood shed by the slaves in Jamaica who rebelled in Tacky’s Revolt in 1761. And so the artist guides you back to the looping Handsworth Song.
Normally, an exhibition that requires watching a poetry-heavy documentary in a dark room before the main event would feel like so much homework. Here, it’s like being handed the key to break a code and see the world in all its discomforting complexity.
Hurvin Anderson, Tate Britain, until August 23. tate.org.uk
