Tate Britain to open Hurvin Anderson's first ever major retrospective exhibition
- maxwell museums
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Tate Britain has announced it will unveil the first major retrospective exhibition of British artist Hurvin Anderson. It will open on 26 March and run until 23 August 2026.
Around 80 of Anderson’s works will be united for the exhibition, drawn from the artist’s entire career. A major highlight will be a monumental piece inspired by murals at Jamaica’s international airport, which will be making its debut in Britain.
Featuring colour-drenched landscapes and interiors, Anderson’s work is inspired from both sides of the Atlantic — the UK and the Caribbean — and it reflects his experiences of belonging and diaspora.
The exhibition will run at Tate Britain nine years after the artist was nominated for the Tate-organised Turner Prize in 2017, where he lost out to Lubaina Himid. His work was also included as part of Tate Britain’s 2021 group exhibition, Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s – Now.
What to expect inside Tate Britain’s Hurvin Anderson exhibition
The artworks in this show will be displayed thematically, so visitors can follow the journey through Anderson’s 30-year practice.
Born in Birmingham, he was the first member of his family to be born in England, after his father emigrated from Jamaica in 1961. The exhibition will begin with family photographs, early portraits and studies depicting family members, collectively setting the scene of his boyhood. Here will be the earliest painted work in the show, Bev (1995), a double portrait of his sister, who appears simultaneously as a woman and as a young girl.
A key development in Anderson’s unique visual language will be explored through four paintings from his Ball Watching series (1997-2003), which established his preoccupation with revisiting and formatting different elements of the same subject across multiple works.
Derived from a photograph he took of his friends watching their football in the water in Handsworth Park in Birmingham, in Ball Watching Anderson transforms a recognisable image of Englishness into a tropical locale by layering one location onto another. These works speak to the unreliability of memory and tension around cultural heritage.
Another highlight for visitors will be his prolific long-term Barbershop series, which he embarked on for 18 years — from 2006 to 2023. These are his best known works in Britain according to Tate. This series reflects a major theme in Anderson’s work: re-imagining of public spaces that have individual and cultural significance.
The Barbershop paintings reference a period in the 1950s and 60s when Caribbean immigrants created make-shift barbershops in their homes, serving as places for social gatherings, as well as for economic enterprise. Tate Britain will show an early painting from the series — Jersey (2008) — alongside some of the most recent versions, including Skiffle and Shear Cut (both 2023).
Anderson's Barbershop series is expected to be a particular draw for visitors, especially as when they were exhibited at the Hepworth Wakefield gallery in Yorkshire in 2023, they were awarded a five-star review from the Telegraph. Art critic Alastair Sooke described Anderson as "one of Britain’s finest living painters."
Anderson's seminal painting Is It OK To Be Black? (2015-6) will be seen too. It is a rare instance in which he has included recognisable figures in his work, exploring the complexities of race relations and cultural history.
Featuring semi abstracted images of key figures in black history — including Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X — the artist in this painting subverts the gaze of the viewer, placing us in the role of sitter and directly involving us in the conversation.
Hurvin Anderson’s Passenger Opportunity UK debut
A major wow moment will also come in the form of a monumental piece that serves as a loose historical record of emigration from Jamaica to Britain from the 1940s to the 1970s.
Passenger Opportunity first debuted at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in November 2024 and is inspired by two murals painted by Carl Abrahams in 1985 for the departure lounge of Jamaica’s Norman Manley International Airport. Anderson developed the huge work after seeing Abrahams’ murals many times as he travelled to and from Jamaica through Miami while participating in the 2022 Kingston Biennial.
Passenger Opportunity will make its debut in the UK at Anderson’s Tate Britain exhibition. It will be shown in a reworked and expanded form, with eight new panels added from its Miami unveiling. The new additions reflect its fresh presentation in the British capital, offering additional historical narratives which delve into the relationship between the UK and the Caribbean.
Jamaica will also feature through seven works from Anderson’s hauntingly evocative Jamaican hotel series, including Grace Jones (2020) and Ashanti Blood (2021). Inspired by a visit to the island in 2017, these works depict derelict hotels, once only accessible to tourists, now engulfed by vegetation and reclaimed for the natural environment.
Hurvin Anderson exhibition tickets
Tickets to Hurvin Anderson’s exhibition at Tate Britain are available to pre-book now. Standard adult tickets are £18, while children aged 12-18 can get in for free. Tate members can also visit for free. While pre-booking is always officially advised by Tate, it’s likely not necessary for this show, and I suspect walk-up tickets will be available most days.
The Hurvin Anderson exhibition is curated by Tate’s Dominique Heyse-Moore, Senior Curator, Contemporary British Art and Jasmine Kaur Chohan, Assistant Curator, Contemporary British Art. It is supported by The Parker Foundation and the Huo Family Foundation.
Fans of Anderson will also be able to take 60 of his most impressive works home with them, thanks to the accompanying exhibition catalogue published by Tate Publishing. The 228-page paperback is available to pre-order now.
Anderson's exhibition is part of a busy year for Tate Britain. The most anticipated of all their 2026 shows is a major retrospective of James McNeill Whistler, one of the most influential American painters ever. There will also be a huge examination of UK pop-culture of the 1990s (curated by former British Vogue editor Edward Enninful OBE), and a major exhibition of Bloomsbury Group-artists Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant. It’s also expected that this year Tate Britain will unveil their new Clore Garden in the landscape around the gallery.
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