HURVIN ANDERSON’S “BARBERSHOP” series belongs to a long tradition of painterly fascination with the spaces of social interaction that reflect both the physical realities and ideological aspirations of society at large. Anderson’s exhibition “Salon Paintings” at England’s Hastings Contemporary, organized in collaboration with the Hepworth Wakefield, also in England, and Kistefos Museum in Jevnaker, Norway, brings together a body of work he produced between 2006 and 2023 that portrays, albeit in the loosest sense of the word, men’s hair salons. Inspired by a visit to a barbershop in Birmingham with the artist’s Jamaican-born father, the series reflects the importance of such spaces for the Caribbean British community, as sites of conversation and exchange as well as of cultural pride and preservation. This is particularly evident in one work, Is it OK to Be Black?, 2016, the title of which riffs on the routine barbershop question “Is it OK in the back?” The painting depicts a bright blue wall with a shelf at its bottom lined with colorful bottles of hair products. The wall is covered with photographs. Most of them are blurred, but those depicting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are clearly recognizable, explicitly alluding to Black history. The portraits also introduce a sense of spatial ambiguity. While the bottles, ostensibly renderings of real objects, appear flat and compacted, these pictures-within-a-picture are more carefully modeled, possessing volume and depth. It is as though these representations of representations became portals into a physical world.
