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The Guardian

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

24 March 2026

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.

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