Durham Press' new releases with artist Hurvin Anderson, titled He's Upstairs 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.
Hurvin Anderson | He's Upstairs (2023)
