Jersey
- Artist: Hurvin Anderson
- Date: 2008
- Medium: Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 2503 x 2083 mm
- Museum: Tate Britain
- Collection record: Tate Britain website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
"This is 'Jersey' by Hurvin Anderson." The canvas shows a barbershop in Kingsland, Jamaica, with two empty seats at the center and cut‑hair locks scattered across the floor. Objects behind the chairs—spray bottles, razors, hair dryers—are rendered as simple blocks of color, while posters on the back wall are flattened into rectangles. Two white bands above them depict fluorescent strip lights, and horizontal grey lines suggest the pattern on the floor.
Anderson worked from photographs he took himself; he stitches those images together like a collage to build the composition. This process lets memory and perception weave in. As Anderson says, his pictures feel like “being in one place but thinking about another.” Critics note that his thin layers of oil paint resemble 1970s works by Michael Andrews and that the photograph‑based method creates a shift between representation and abstraction.
The barbershop in 'Jersey' also appears in his other pieces—“Barbershop” (2006) and “Flat Tops” (2008). He uses this setting to explore how Caribbean immigrants settled into Britain during the 1950s–60s, when home‑based barbershops became social hubs.
This work was first bought by the Tate Collection in 2009 from the 2008 Outset / Frieze Art Fair Fund. It has been on display at Tate Britain since 2015 and was loaned to venues such as Hepworth Wakefield, Hastings Contemporary, and Kistefos‑Museet.
That’s a quick glimpse into the layered reality of 'Jersey.'
See it in person
Jersey is in the collection of Tate Britain on Millbank, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
