Hurvin Anderson 26 Nov 2008 - 10 Jan 2009

The Directors of Thomas Dane Gallery are pleased to announce Hurvin Anderson's second exhibition at the gallery.

Anderson has approached his solo exhibition ambitiously as an experiment, presenting paintings as well as groupings of small works on paper, studies of sorts that link between his photographs and final paintings. In bringing together sketches, acrylics, cut-out photographs and small sculptures, the artist reveals an aspect of the private alchemical and intuitive processes at work in his studio.

Hurvin Anderson returns repeatedly to paint places of social interaction. Parks, bars, local corner stores, barbershops and country clubs have resonance for the artist, who is both reflecting the Caribbean and responding to the complex spacial layers that these sites offer.

For this exhibition, in one of his paintings, Anderson returns to the Tennis Court, from an earlier Country Club series. On a trip to Trinidad, he photographed the tennis court at a distance through a chicken wire fence. This was the starting point for his continued investigation into barriers, and their iconographic potential. The artist is drawn again and again to the inherent contradiction of these barriers which simultaneously impose distance and yet attract through their formal design.

In other works in the show Anderson has pared back the image to focus only on the patterns and shapes of the window grills, fences, wrought iron gates and beaded curtains. These ubiquitous structures that are designed to keep one out, become the way into Hurvin Anderson's paintings. As such, these motifs go beyond their decorative functions to become a method for creating tension within the pictorial space.

Hurvin Anderson was born in Birmingham in 1965 and lives and works in London. He completed his MA in painting at the Royal College of Art, 1996-98, and his BA Hons Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art, 1991-94. The artist has exhibited widely in the UK, including the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London and the Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre, both in 2006. Anderson had a solo show with Anthony Meier Fine Art, San Francisco earlier this year.