When Jeffrey Uslip joined Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis early last year as chief curator, he knew the artist he most wanted to break into the Contemporary with his first major museum show in the United States. With the opening of “Hurvin Anderson: Backdrop” on Friday, September 11, Uslip made it happen.
Anderson is a British artist of Jamaican descent. Born in Birmingham, United Kingdom, to Jamaican parents in 1965, he draws his source material from Birmingham’s Afro-Caribbean community, as well as from Trinidad, where he was an artist-in-residence. He now lives and works in London.
Anderson’s show sprawls across two large rooms and hallways at the Contemporary, giving Uslip space to curate work in a wide range of media, including a number of monumental drawings and paintings. Uslip told media on Friday that this is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date and the first exhibition of his hybrids that pair landscape paintings with inset details of the photographs he painted from.
The show includes an entire room of what Uslip called the artist’s “improvisational barbershop” paintings. It’s the barbershops more than the paintings that were improvised. As Anderson quietly looked on, Uslip described how Jamaican immigrants improvised their own barbershops in attic spaces after being denied service by white British barbers. This series began, Uslip said, when the artist discovered a photograph of his father, Stepford Anderson, getting his hair cut.
Uslip pointed out that the “improvisational barbershop” photos are dominated by blank spaces – smudges of color, rather than distinct renderings. This has the powerful effect of suggesting distant memories, where a powerful experience has been recollected, but not in realistic detail.
Anderson also uses a smudgy, abstracted technique in his landscape paintings. Given the use of greens and other earth tones, Uslip described them evocatively as “camouflage paintings,” and noted the artist’s technique of allowing his stabs of paint to drip down the canvas as giving “the feeling of slipping away.”
“This work suggests the possibilities of what landscape can say about our own personalities,” Uslip said.
The barbershop scenes and landscapes are all gorgeous, vivid paintings that are extremely easy on the eye, particularly in a space like the Contemporary, where one expects to be challenged, as much as pleased.
More challenging and less pleasing, at least to these eyes, are Anderson’s monumental drawings, which look like scribbles, and his sculptures, which are replicas of cartons of carryout food or manufactured products, such as fried chicken or hair dye. Uslip described the sculptures as Anderson’s “most politically courageous work,” which seems a huge stretch. The sculpture was described as “previously unseen,” however, making it a curatorial coup.
The inclusion of the sculptures, drawings and hybrids is what makes this show the “most comprehensive” exhibition yet devoted to an artist best known as a painter. Uslip can certainly be forgiven for including less visually pleasing work in order to show St. Louis, the United States and the world new dimensions of an important artist, for whom Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis will always be a major career milestone.
“Hurvin Anderson: Backdrop” is on display at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 3750 Washington Blvd., through December 27. Visit camstl.org.
