Hurvin Anderson | Welcome Series

Durham Press is proud to announce the completion of Welcome Series: Margaritas, Hurvin Anderson's latest edition. The print, published in an edition of thirty and measuring 38 x 58 5/8 inches, combines seventy-one woodblock and twenty-seven screenprint impressions in fifty-two colors. Margaritas further explores the imagery from Anderson's previous Welcome Series works, including the 2011 edition with Durham Press Welcome Series: Black and White as well as many paintings exploring similar imagery. In these works, British-born Anderson depicts scenes from the Caribbean, including his parent's home country of Jamaica and Trinidad where he held residency in 2002. The series, both in painting and in print, is unified by the motif of security grilles, nearly ubiquitous devices used to protect homes and businesses on these islands. For Anderson, these gates convey both physical and emotional distance: a feeling of living between two places, of returning to a "homeland" as not only a stranger, but a foreigner.

Though his work often returns to the same locations and scenes, Anderson reveals different imagery and techniques with each reiteration. While Margaritas recalls Welcome Series: Black and White, this new print dramatically alters the composition with the addition of color, as well as new screenprint and woodblock elements. The suggested oscillation of a fan imparts a sense of movement, the receding lines of the bar deepen the space, and the numerous colors and rich textures allure the viewer. Nevertheless, the security grille's geometric pattern interrupts the landscape and makes it inaccessible. Through a mastery of both silkscreen and relief printing, Anderson expresses these tensions between desire and restriction as well as abstraction and figuration; lines meet to create the skewed perspective of a room, figures and landscapes are obscured by the geometric pattern of the grille, hand-carved bottles are bathed in translucent colors. Margaritas displays many of the motifs of Anderson's past works, demonstrating his ability to unearth new meaning by continuing to investigate a concept.