Hurvin Anderson | He's Upstairs – Room at the Top

2023

  • Durham Press' new releases with artist Hurvin Anderson, titled He's Upstairs (above) and Room at the Top, mark his latest exploration of his Peter Series which he has revisited in a variety of mediums, both in and out of the print studio. Originally beginning as his Peter paintings, Anderson extended this series to his print practice last year with The Attic monoprints. In his two new editions with Durham Press, Anderson revisits these themes in the form of etchings.

     

    Whether it is with the loose washes of color seen in Room at the Top, or the distinct, intricate lines seen in He's Upstairs, all of Anderson's projects in this series are formed from the same geometric structure. This space is a reference to the small attics converted into barbershops created by first wave Afro-Caribbeans; for people like Anderson and his family who emigrated from Jamaica to Britain, these barbershops played a large role in his childhood and have remained in his mind also as an important social space, of sharing a communal culture.

     

    In Anderson’s paintings he often explicitly references these barbershops through the inclusion of a figure; in his new editions, the absence of that figure is striking as it removes that figure from a supposedly social space. He’s Upstairs still retains remnants of that presence, though even those traces are intangible: a mirror reflects an empty space, an octagonal clock no longer reveals the time. Human presence is now gone, as if evaporated through the room’s translucent floor, but we still feel it.

  • Room at the Top descends further from the corporeal as the room becomes a shell and shrinks dramatically in scale,...
    Hurvin Anderson | Room at the Top (2023)

    Room at the Top descends further from the corporeal as the room becomes a shell and shrinks dramatically in scale, like the memory of a space that can no longer sustain a person, or even an object, in its thin pale walls. The titles themselves reference this change: He's Upstairs refers to an anonymous 'he' and conjures an image of someone we cannot see, while Room at the Top remains empty and out of sight.These two new editions continue to break down and reconstruct a space much as memory does when we keep returning to a subject. Each time we revisit a memory we see it in anew - maybe further from reality, or maybe in a different way as it shifts through time.

     

    He's Upstairs is an etching, screenprint, and woodblock print released in an edition of twenty-six. It measures 50 x 37 ¾ inches and is printed on Saunders Waterford paper. Room at the Top is an etching released in an edition of twenty-two. It measures 16 x 13 1/8 inches and is printed on Revere White paper.