Hurvin Anderson: Barbershop

Hurvin Anderson (b. 1965) first painted a Birmingham-based barbershop in 2006. Over the last 15 years, Anderson has repeatedly reworked the same barbershop in a multitude of ways to explore key painting styles, shifting from figuration to abstraction, and experimenting with the classic genres of still life, landscape and portraiture.

This large solo exhibition will focus on the Barbershop series as a lens through which to understand Anderson’s wider practice and key concerns of memory, identity and nationhood. The exhibition will reveal the creative process Anderson goes through by displaying the sketches and drawings from his planning stages, 3D models he has made of the barbershop and objects he has sourced derived from his photographs of the scene. It will also include a new large-scale drawing and new painting begun in 2022, which will be the largest and final work in the Barbershop series.

Alongside the Barbershop exhibition, Hurvin Anderson Curates will display paintings drawn from public collections in the UK to take visitors on a journey through his formative influences and highlight the importance of art historical references in his work. On display will be paintings from the 20th century which reveal points of conversation with his own practice, including work by Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, Lubaina Himid and Leon Kossoff.