Hurvin Anderson’s monotype series with Durham Press, titled The Attic, continues to expand upon common themes he has explored throughout his painting practice, most notably in his Peter Series paintings. Though heavily abstracted, the geometric perspective of these prints draws directly from his Peter paintings of small attics converted into barbershops, a common practice amongst first wave Afro-Caribbeans. For Anderson and his family, who emigrated to Britain from Jamaica, these attic barbershops were not only a place to have your hair cut, but also a social space where stories are told, interactions are had, information shared – though in these works all without a figure present.

Like much of Anderson’s practice, The Attic series exists between abstraction and representation, memory and experience. Anderson breaks down this sense of spatial reality by dissolving the walls of the room into transparent blue washes of color or obstructs them by overlaying strong patterns. Any sense of grounding or space is evaporated in different ways in each print, revealing Anderson’s iterative process as he works through an image, ultimately breaking down and dissecting its fundamental structure.