How Hurvin Anderson Conquered the Art Market

“I didn’t see another white face. That’s not the kind of country I want to live in.” These words of the former shadow justice secretary and now Reform UK defector, Robert Jenrick, were splashed across the media in October 2025. The place he was describing was Handsworth, Birmingham, a place forever linked with an uprising in 1985 sparked by the arrest of a Black man and a police raid on a pub. In the unrest that followed 35 people were injured and two died.

Over the preceding decades waves of migrants from the Caribbean and South Asia had settled in Handsworth to be met with endemic housing and employment discrimination. Tensions were exacerbated by a strained relationship between local police and Black and Asian residents – one defined by resentment and distrust due to arbitrary use of stop-and-search laws and a generally racist and aggressive style of policing.

Handsworth is Hurvin Anderson’s hometown. The youngest of eight children, he was born in 1965 to Jamaican parents who had migrated from the Caribbean as part of the Windrush generation. He was the only one of the eight Anderson children to be born in Britain. For many in Handsworth’s immigrant community the events of 1985 underscored an existing sense of precariousness of belonging – and they clearly left a mark on Anderson.

The Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs (1986), directed by John Akomfrah as a response to the uprisings weaving together archival news footage, photographs, sound and poetic narration into an hour-long experimental film, is included in Tate Britain’s retrospective Hurvin Anderson (until 23 August) as a companion piece at the artist’s own request. The film acts not only as a framework for viewing the paintings, but also as a key to better understanding why Anderson has spent his career traversing the unstable terrain between Britain and the Caribbean, his own experience and generational memory.

Along the way, Anderson has become an art market phenomenon, although you wouldn't necessarily know it. The number of living British painters whose work has achieved a higher auction record than his – £7.4 million in 2021 for Audition, 1998 – can be counted comfortably on one hand: David Hockney (£70m in 2018 for Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972), Peter Doig (£30m in 2021 for Swamped, 1990) and Jenny Saville (£9.5m in 2018 for Propped, 1990). That's it.

Although, like Toxteth and Brixton, Handsworth is now synonymous with historical civil unrest, in Anderson’s youth it was a culturally vibrant place where reggae, calypso and bhangra could be heard in basement record shops, cafes acted as improvised community centres and intellectual stomping grounds (for heavyweights like the cultural theorists Stuart Hall and Paul Gillroy), and Desi pubs served up pints and curries in equal measure. It was a formative landscape that resurfaces in Anderson’s work again and again. His paintings do not depict conflict directly but attempt to construct a geography of “home” that addresses the problem of, as he puts it, “being in one place and thinking about another.”

Part of the appeal of Anderson's work is that, while it is never a straightforward depiction of reality, it comes from a real place. It expresses truths about the experience of being Black and British, of life in the diaspora, and none of it feels workshopped or calculated to sell paintings. His career, like his market, has developed organically and in its own time.

Hurvin Anderson, Shear Cut, 2023, acrylic on paper on canvas, 215 × 234 cm. Photo: Richard Ivey © Hurvin Anderson. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery.

In the early 1990s Anderson began studying at Wimbledon College of Art and went on to complete an MA at the Royal College of Art in1998. At the RCA he studied under Peter Doig, whose own paintings exploring the boundaries of figuration and abstraction, memory and invention, offered a model for what his own could be. In a number of interviews Anderson has challenged comparisons with Doig, but the encounter evidently reinforced a confidence in painting as a space of ambiguity, where images can be constructed as much from recollection as from observation and straddle multiple places simultaneously.

Anderson’s Ball Watching series is an example of just this sort of play, based on a photograph taken in Handsworth Park of a group of his friends lined up on the edge of a pond trying to work out how to rescue a football errantly kicked into the water. Across the four primary works in the series Anderson both paints directly from the photograph and modifies its meaning, as Gillian Forrester highlights in Tate Britain’s exhibition catalogue: “…He depicted the sky and lake with rich blues and turquoise, and added dark vessels on the skyline – alluding, he told me, to the Black Star Line, the shipping corporation founded by the Jamaican pan-African activist Marcus Garvey. The scene is at once idyllic and uncanny, rooted simultaneously in Anderson’s first-hand experience and the history of what Paul Gilroy has termed the ‘Black Atlantic’.”

Given how dynamic and instinctive Anderson's paint handling often seems, you could be forgiven for overlooking just how meticulously considered the paintings are in both concept and execution. This may go some way towards explaining the relatively low number of finished works that have left Anderson's studio in his near three-decade career, which in turn accounts for how he has avoided being buried under market commentary and speculation.

Credit for this must also go in part to Anderson's long-time gallerist Thomas Dane, who has represented Anderson and plotted a measured course for his career since he graduated from the RCA. From those early days Dane succeeded in strategically placing the relatively small number of Anderson’s works with artworld insiders and institutions.

Early acquisitions of major works from the Barbershop series by the UK Government Art Collection in 2007 and the Tate in 2008 represented significant institutional endorsement less than ten years after Anderson left art school (back when that was still considered fast), as did his solo exhibition as part of Tate Britain's Art Now series in 2009.

Secondary market activity heated up shortly thereafter, when Untitled (Beach Scene), 2003 – sold at Sotheby's in October 2009 for four times its estimate at nearly £100,000. The same work sold again at Sotheby's for £300,000 in 2013. By 2014 the collector Charles Saatchi was selling his paintings by Anderson for more than £1m each, ushering in years of slow and steady increases, with only one or two major works a year coming to auction. In 2017, the year of Anderson's Turner Prize nomination, the sale of Country Club: Chicken Wire (2008)– for £2.6m nudged Anderson's auction record up further.

The Turner Prize nomination was for Anderson's 2016 Dub Versions exhibition at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham, which signalled a subtle shift of emphasis. For that show the Arts Council Collection commissioned Is it Ok to Be Black? (2016). Where Anderson's work had always been politically charged, this was arguably the first of his works to be more explicit, perhaps opening the way for the prize jury to declare that his work "speaks to our current political moment".

In that context it's interesting that the £7.4m auction sale that put Anderson firmly in the premier league of contemporary painters in 2021 was not one of his obviously attractive views of Caribbean beaches or country clubs that were widely coveted throughout the 2010s but Audition, an ambiguous and challenging image of a council-run swimming pool in Birmingham.

Hurvin Anderson, Is It OK To Be Black?, 2015-16, painting, 130 x 100cm. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © A 70th Anniversary Commission for the Arts Council Collection with New Art Exchange, Nottingham and Thomas Dane Gallery, London. © Hurvin Anderson.

Is there room for Anderson's market to be elevated even further from these already lofty heights? Instructive comparison might be made with the generation of painters who have followed him, including Michael Armitage (born 1984), whose early works such as Hornbill (2014) were heavily influenced by Anderson's compositions. But whereas Armitage has works in the permanent collections of both MoMA and The Met in New York, none of the major American museums owns a canvas by Anderson. And where Armitage was included in the 2019 Venice Biennale and has just opened a major survey show at François Pinault's Palazzo Grassi (The Promise of Change, until 10 January 2027), Anderson’s work has never been the subject of a major show at a top-tier institution outside of the UK or been included in a major biennial.

Essentially Jenrick and Anderson are involved in asking the same question – not just "Is it Ok to Be Black?" but "is it British to be Black?" Perhaps the ultimate irony is that what makes Anderson a homegrown success is how very British his work is. It is inextricably entangled with the ongoing social and economic repercussions of our nation’s unreckoned with colonial past, as relevant today as in 1985. That it speaks softly to the core of many of our most closely held and painful national anxieties may make it difficult to be parsed by international institutions and collectors outside the family fold. It may just be conversations around the body of work on show at Tate Britain that finally decode for a global audience what we as Britons innately understand and celebrate in Hurvin Anderson.

Stephanie Brady Cummings is a freelance art & culture writer. She is a former BBC journalist and holds MAs from University College London and Central Saint Martins. You can find her @sisyphus_paused on Instagram.