Past Exhibition
20 May – 7 August 2022
Painter Hurvin Anderson (b. 1965, UK) reflects on illusory and fragmentary space and depictions of black figures and experience in The Unseen, an artist-curated selection of 25 works from the Christen Sveaas Art Foundation.
Drawing on the prologue to American writer Ralph Ellison’s celebrated novel, Invisible Man (1952), about the invisibility of black lives, Anderson brings together lesser-known artists with modern and contemporary figures, each of whom explore aspects of ‘the unseen’ using materials from coal dust and fabric to fibre and glass.
The exhibition includes work by: Ross Bleckner, Amoako Boafo, Svein Bolling, Borghild Røed Lærum, Constantin Brancusi, Matt Connors, Lars Elling, Tewodros Hagos, Mona Orstad Hansen, Thore Heramb, Howard Hodgkin, Per Krohg, Glenn Ligon, Ibrahim Mahama, Herman Mbamba, Simphiwe Ndzube, Henrik Placht, Robert Rauschenberg, Caragh Thuring, Judy Sirks Vevle, Jakob Weidemann, Stanley Whitney, Christopher Wool, and Toby Ziegler.
Christen Sveaas is a Norwegian businessman, collector and philanthropist who has collected art and antique silver for more than 40 years. He began his art collection with late 19th century and early 20th century Norwegian artists including Johan Christian Dahl, Edvard Munch and Harald Sohlberg. In the early 1990s he was introduced to the work of Howard Hodgkin which inspired him to start collecting international contemporary artists. The collection’s focus is primarily painting with some sculpture and photography and is made up of more than 2000 works of art by over 300 artists. In 1996 Christen Sveaas founded the Kistefos Museum on the grounds of his grandfather Anders Sveaas’ old wood pulp mill at Jevnaker, north of Oslo. The wood pulp mill was active from 1889 until 1955 but is still intact. The museum has one of the most important sculpture parks in Europe, an industrial museum and two exhibition spaces for contemporary art. The museum building, The Twist, which straddles the river that divides the park was designed by BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group architects, opened in 2019. The same year, Christen Sveaas established the Christen Sveaas Art Foundation which the following year received some 800 works of art from his personal collection to be made available to Kistefos as well as other Norwegian and international museums.
Hurvin Anderson (b.1965, Birmingham) lives and works between London and Cambridgeshire. His paintings explore spaces occupied by Caribbean immigrants, such as public parks, gardens, barbershops and domestic interiors, which function as sites for both social gathering and economic enterprise. These settings represent the artist’s personal and cultural memories of functional spaces and shared experiences of the Caribbean. Born in Birmingham, United Kingdom, to parents of Jamaican descent, Anderson studied at the Wimbledon School of Art followed by the Royal College of Art, where he explored the relevance of figuration in a world dominated by abstraction and Conceptual art. Since then, he has pursued both landscape and abstract painting, exploring his own relationships to place by recalling social history and memory.
Anderson has exhibited at the Arts Club, Chicago (2021), Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2021); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2016); Nottingham Arts Centre, Nottingham (2016); Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis (2015); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2013); Tate Modern London (2009); and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2009). He has participated in group exhibitions at, among others, the Tate Britain (2021); Perez Art Museum, Miami (2015); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2013); David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen (2011); and Saatchi Gallery, London (2010). He is currently participating in British Art Show 9 and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2017.
