Hurvin Anderson is the name on everyone’s lips right now. In October Audition (1998), a rediscovered canvas of a public swimming pool, sold for £7.4 million at Christie’s in London, setting a new world record for the artist at auction. He’s also the subject of a brilliant new solo show at Thomas Dane Gallery and is part of the forthcoming exhibition at Tate Britain showing work by artists from the Caribbean who made their home in Britain.
Spanning both of Thomas Dane’s London galleries, Reverb features a series of disquieting works centred on a derelict hotel complex on the north coast of Jamaica. One of his most arresting cycles of paintings to date, it combines figurative landscape and modernist abstraction, while exploring the tension between nature and the man-made, modernity, interiority, longing, belonging and otherness. Like much of his practice, it touches on his Jamaican heritage and examines themes of memory, identity and nationhood to dazzling effect.
Anderson acknowledges the ambivalence in his compositions. ‘I am looking at where things collide, how these things respond to each other,’ he has said. ‘I like the contradictions and the friction that results. I have been thinking of things like overlapping worlds.’
Highlights on display include Grace Jones (2020), one of few paintings in the series to show a figure; and Limestone Wall (2020), which depicts an abandoned suite of rooms overrun with tropical vegetation depicted in gorgeous greens, teals and olives. There is something supremely beautiful yet menacing about these works. Which is of course what makes them so compelling. Take yourself to Davies Street pronto.
Curated by art historian Carrie Scott, Once Upon a Turquoise Past presents new photographic work by the art collector, patron and writer Maryam Eisler. Captured in the early-winter light at Leighton House — the opulent Kensington home of Orientalist Lord Leighton — this new series blends colours, patterns, cultural references and social histories, transporting the viewer into another world. It also explores Eisler’s continued interest in depicting the female form — the Sublime Feminine — through plays on light.
Born in Iran and raised in Europe and later in New York, Eisler draws inspiration from the world around her. In this series, she looks at everything from the turquoise-tiled domes of her homeland and 19th-century European literature to the colours and gloss of 1980s New York. In doing so, she creates visual wonderlands that are intriguing as they are bewitching.
