Spanning three decades and around 80 works, Tate Britain’s landmark exhibition traces Hurvin Anderson’s movement between Britain and the Caribbean through landscape, portraiture and charged interior scenes.
Hurvin Anderson at Tate Britain
26th March, 2026 – 23rd August, 2026
Tate Britain
Millbank
London SW1P 4RG
Tate Britain will present the first major survey exhibition of British artist Hurvin Anderson, bringing together around 80 works from across his career, from early paintings to the present day, including a room of previously unseen works.
Moving through luminous landscapes and closely observed interiors, the exhibition follows Anderson’s singular exploration of diaspora, memory and belonging across Britain and the Caribbean. Reflecting on lives shaped by movement and inheritance, the artist describes this sensibility as ‘being in one place but thinking about another’.
With its sustained attention to atmosphere, identity and the language of British landscape painting, the exhibition confirms Anderson as one of the most compelling artists working today.
Born in England after his father emigrated from Jamaica in 1961, Anderson was raised in Birmingham, an experience that has remained central to his practice. Equally formative was his period as an artist-in-residence in Trinidad. Across the exhibition, the specific places, people and encounters of his early life appear to drift across time, becoming unsettled and reconfigured.
The display mirrors this logic, moving back and forth through the artist’s 30-year practice rather than following a strictly linear route. Family photographs, early portraits and studies of relatives open the exhibition and establish the emotional and visual terrain of his boyhood.
Among them are Bev (1995), a double portrait of his sister that presents her at once as a woman and a young girl, and Hollywood Boulevard (1997), which shows Anderson as a child beside his father. In paintings such as these, past and present fold into one another, forming imagined support systems and unstable recollections.
A key strand of Anderson’s visual language emerges in four paintings from the Ball Watching series (1997–2010), which established his method of revisiting and reworking a subject across multiple canvases. Based on a photograph of friends watching football in the water in Handsworth Park, Birmingham, the series transforms a recognisable image of English life into something more fluid and tropical by overlaying one geography with another.
Hurvin Anderson at Tate Britain, installation view.
Photo: Tate Photography (Larina Annora Fernandes).
These works bring together several of Anderson’s defining concerns, including the instability of memory and the tensions that shape cultural inheritance. Screened outside the exhibition, the 1986 film essay Handsworth Songs by Black Audio Film Collective offers further context for the social and political world of 1970s and 1980s Birmingham that informed the artist’s youth.
Public spaces with personal and collective resonance have long occupied Anderson’s work, and few subjects recur more insistently than the barbershop. Throughout his practice, the barbershop becomes both motif and social record, carrying personal memory as well as the wider history of Caribbean-British life.
The Barbershop series (2006–2023) recalls the improvised barbershops established in homes by Caribbean immigrants during the 1950s and 1960s, spaces that functioned as sites of work, conversation and community. Alongside the Peter’s series (2007–09), these paintings have become among Anderson’s best-known works in the UK. Tate Britain will present Peter’s Sitters II (2009), centred on an anonymous seated figure, alongside early Barbershop paintings such as Jersey (2008) and more recent works including Skiffle and Shear Cut (both 2023).
See also
One of the exhibition’s central moments is the UK debut of Anderson’s monumental Passenger Opportunity (2024–25), inspired by two murals painted in 1985 by Carl Abrahams for Jamaica’s Norman Manley International Airport. Functioning as a loose historical record of migration from Jamaica to Britain between the 1940s and 1970s, the 16-panel work will be reconfigured for Tate Britain, with new historical narratives that extend its reflection on the relationship between Britain and the Caribbean.
Anderson’s visit to Trinidad in 2002 marked another important turning point. There, he experienced a persistent sense of dislocation, at once insider and outsider. Tate Britain will show four works from the Welcome series, in which a Caribbean bar is seen through a red security grille encountered during that trip. Fences and grilles recur throughout Anderson’s work as devices of distance, placing the viewer at a physical and emotional remove from the scene. This position of estrangement continues in later paintings such as Country Club: Chicken Wire (2008), where a hexagonal fence separates the viewer from the image and carries the residue of racial and social segregation in Trinidad. The exhibition also includes seven works from Anderson’s evocative Jamaican hotel series, among them Grace Jones (2020) and Ashanti Blood (2021). Prompted by a visit in 2017, these paintings depict derelict hotels once reserved for tourists, now overtaken by vegetation and slowly reclaimed by the landscape.
Anderson’s seminal painting Is It OK To Be Black? (2015–16) stands apart as a rare example in which recognisable figures enter his work directly. Featuring semi-abstracted images of figures including Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the painting addresses the complexities of race, representation and cultural history with unusual force. Here, Anderson turns the act of looking back on itself, placing the viewer in the position of sitter and drawing us into the work’s central tension.
With this major Tate Britain exhibition, Hurvin Anderson’s painting comes into view as both deeply personal and historically expansive. Across portraiture, landscape and interior scenes, his work traces the movement of people, images and memory across the Atlantic, offering a richly layered account of Caribbean-British experience and securing his place among the leading painters of his generation.
Hurvin Anderson at Tate Britain opened on the 26th of March, 2026 until the 23rd of August, 2026
©2026 Tate, Hurvin Anderson
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